Wired: Wire-aware Circuit Description

Other conference contribution, 2005

As we strive towards higher abstraction levels, the designer can lose control over low-level details, which eventually turn out to have significant impact on circuit performance. In particular, it is the routing wires that dominate the non-functional properties of circuits in deep sub-micron technologies. In the proposed system, called Wired, the designer can express circuit function together with detailed placement of cells and wires, in order to get more precise control over the result. The system allows direct analysis of non-functional properties, and in fact, the result of such analyses can be used to guide instantiation decisions. Case studies show that common structures, such as parallel prefix computations, and even non-trivial versions, are described efficiently in Wired.