The objective of this project is to prototype the next generation "component" based electronic design system using pre-built design objects with embedded simulation capability. Also we would like to demonstrate the feasibility and evaluate the usability of such a system.
A coding-debugging loop best describes how one does design today: coded in HDL, a design will have to go through a sequence of simulation and revision processeses until it is fully validated. Consequently, the availability of the simulator, as well as the computing resources necessary to support the simulation, has become burdensome. Furthermore, the traditional approach does not address the collaboration aspect of the design well because early designs are simple and do not require a collaborative environment . Finally, there hasn't been a good methodology for efficiently incorporating the intellectual property into existing designs that are being developed.
Our approach based on the WELD paradigm aims to reduce the complexity of the design process by hierarchically constructing a top level design using many build-once and use-many-times distributed design objects . With our new approach, the reuse of the old design is greatly simplified: swapping components does not require significant modifications of other part of the component hierarchy. Because components are distributed across the network and the "simulator" is embedded into each component, the verification of the complete design might be as easy as bringing up the Netscape browser and pushing a button to do a simulation.
After reviewing many papers and journals on the distributed object technology, we have decided to adopt SunSoft's JAVA RMI (Remote Method Invocation) as the toolkit of our choice. For the next three months, the development of a first distributed prototype will be under way. In addition, we will explore the possibilities of making components "JAVABEAN" compliant.
A detailed description of the overall goals and deliverables planned in this project can be found at http://www-cad.eecs.berkeley.edu/~zhengyu/arpa_report2.html
In the past three months, I have made progress on several areas which include:
For the coming quarter, I will be implementing such a design system
based on existing specification. As a new component technology, JavaBean
enables fast application prototyping using pre-built components so that
objects could be manipulated visually. It will be interesting to see how
we can incorporate this technology into our system.