Transcript No Slide Title

PAR Presentation
DASC meeting at DAC, June 21, 2001
Project title:
A standard for an Advanced Library
Format (ALF) describing Integrated Circuit
(IC) technology, cells, and blocks
Official reporter: Wolfgang Roethig
[email protected]
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Contributors
The following people have contributed to create and
review the PAR for the ALF project
Jay Abraham
Tim Burks
Liz Chambers
Shir-Shen Chang
Joe Daniels
Greg DuFour
Tim Ehrler Philips
Simon Favre
Pierre Girouard
Nancy Nettleton
Cynthia Parrish
Steffen Rochel
Wolfgang Roethig
Sergei Sokolov
Li Pen Yuan
Alex Zamfirescu
Silicon Metrics
Magma
Tera Systems
Synopsys
Accellera
Mentor Graphics
Monterey
LogicVision
SUN Microsystems
Adaptive Silicon
Simplex
NEC
Sequence
Avant! Corporation
ASC
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Pertinent information
(field 5 - 8 of PAR form)
• New standard
– Not update of existing PAR
• Life cycle: full use (5 years)
• Individual Sponsor Balloting
– Expected date of initial ballot: May 2002
• Projected completion date: May 2003
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Scope (field 9 of PAR form)
• ALF shall serve as the data specification of library elements for
design applications used to implement integrated circuits. The
range of abstraction shall include from the register-transfer level
(RTL) to the physical implementation level.
• The language shall model behavior, timing, power, signal integrity,
physical abstraction and physical implementation rules of library
elements.
DASC approved with following amendments:
– Original text: “the primary data specification”
Amendment: “the data specification”
– Original text: “the tape-out level”
Amendment: “the physical implementation level”
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Purpose (field 10 of PAR form)
• The purpose of ALF is to provide a modeling
language and semantics for functional, physical and
electrical performance description of technologyspecific libraries for cell-based and block-based
design.
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Purpose (continued)
• Without a standard, design implementation tools
would use multiple proprietary and tool-specific
library descriptions.
• The semantics would be defined by tool
implementations only, which are subject to change
and prone to mis-interpretation.
• Also there would be redundancy using multiple
descriptions for similar library aspects.
• Therefore a standard is proposed to create a
consistent library view suitable as a reference for all
design implementation applications.
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Pertinent information
(field 10 - 11 of PAR form)
• Patent policy has been reviewed with Paul Menchini
• Copyright of Accellera ALF specification document is
being released to IEEE
– contact Dennis Brophy, Accellera chairman, for details
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Standards with similar scope
(field 12 of PAR form)
• IEEE 1481-1999 Std contains a clause for Procedural
Interface (PI) and another clause for Delay Calculation
Language (DCL).
• The PI defined by IEEE 1481-1999 Std may be extended by
OLA (Open Library Architecture) in the future.
• ALF is a standard for modeling, whereas IEEE 1481-1999
Std and OLA are standards for data access.
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Standards with similar scope
(continued)
• There are standards and projects covering parts of the scope,
but none of them encompassing the entire scope. Certain
projects, owned by EDA vendors, are positioned and used as
de-facto standards. However, their usage is not royalty-free,
and versions are controlled by the vendors. Therefore, they are
difficult to support, combine and enhance by parties others than
the originating vendors. Furthermore, such projects do not
supply languages with well-defined semantics. The semantics
are given as reference implementations of particular EDA tools
and are subject to change.
• ALF is the only proposed standard with clearly defined, unified
semantics covering the entire scope of EDA applications
ranging between RTL and tape-out.
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Conclusion
• The ALF study group has prepared a draft PAR
• Signature page has been sent to Paul Menchini
• The ALF study group requests that the PAR be considered for
approval by the DASC
• The request for approval has been granted with the herein
mentioned amendments
• The PAR number 1603 has been assigned to the ALF project
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