Third Caltech Conference On Very Large Scale Integration

Third Caltech Conference on Very Large Scale Integration

The papers in this book were presented at the Third Caltech Conference on Very Large Scale Integration, held March 21-23, 1983 in Pasadena, California. The conference was organized by the Computer Science Depart ment, California Institute of Technology, and was partly supported by the Caltech Silicon Structures Project. This conference focused on the role of systematic methodologies, theoretical models, and algorithms in all phases of the design, verification, and testing of very large scale integrated circuits. The need for such disciplines has arisen as a result of the rapid progress of integrated circuit technology over the past 10 years. This progress has been driven largely by the fabrica tion technology, providing the capability to manufacture very complex elec tronic systems reliably and at low cost. At this point the capability to manufac ture very large scale integrated circuits has exceeded our capability to develop new product designs quickly, reliably, and at a reasonable cost. As a result new designs are undertaken only if the production volume will be large enough to amortize high design costs, products first appear on the market well past their announced delivery date, and reference manuals must be amended to document design flaws. Recent research in universities and in private industry has created an emerg ing science of very large scale integration.

Third Caltech Conference on Very Large Scale Integration

VLSI Placement and Routing: The PI Project

This book provides a superb introduction to and overview of the MIT PI System for custom VLSI placement and routing. Alan Sher man has done an excellent job of collecting and clearly presenting material that was previously available only in various theses, confer ence papers, and memoranda. He has provided here a balanced and comprehensive presentation of the key ideas and techniques used in PI, discussing part of his own Ph. D. work (primarily on the place ment problem) in the context of the overall design of PI and the contributions of the many other PI team members. I began the PI Project in 1981 after learning first-hand how dif ficult it is to manually place modules and route interconnections in a custom VLSI chip. In 1980 Adi Shamir, Leonard Adleman, and I designed a custom VLSI chip for performing RSA encryp tion/decryption [226]. I became fascinated with the combinatorial and algorithmic questions arising in placement and routing, and be gan active research in these areas. The PI Project was started in the belief that many of the most interesting research issues would arise during an actual implementation effort, and secondarily in the hope that a practically useful tool might result. The belief was well-founded, but I had underestimated the difficulty of building a large easily-used software tool for a complex domain; the PI soft ware should be considered as a prototype implementation validating the design choices made.