EECS 298-11: CAD Seminar
Wednesday, April 12, 5pm
531 Cory Hall, Hogan Room

                        Higher Level Design Tools
       
                            Raul Camposano
                               Synopsys

The design of digital systems continues to be dominated by an increase of
complexity of roughly 10 times every 7 years. Accordingly, design tools have
increased their capacity and have enabled the necessary productivity gain. This
talk discusses current advances in electronic design automation, focusing on
higher level design tools. Behavioral synthesis and analysis of source code are
two such examples.  Techniques used in behavioral synthesis include memory
synthesis, different scheduling modes, pipelining, library support, etc.
Source code analysis correlates a design to the HDL source code before and
after synthesis, displaying information such as paths through the design, area
and power of different portions and other statistical information.  The talk
concludes reviewing some general trends in EDA.


Future Seminars:

April 19 - Jacob White, MIT
           "How Matrix-Free Iterative Methods Have Changed Computer 
            Simulation of Circuits, Devices, Interconnect, and 
            Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems"

April 26 - Tom Parks, UC Berkeley
           "Dataflow Process Networks"

May 3    - Antun Domic, Cadence

May 10   - Stan Liao, MIT
           "Code Generation and Optimization for Embedded DSP Processors"