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Overview of Existing Design Environment

The existing design environment at Intel is UNIX-centric. It consists of tightly integrated CAD tools, scripts, and design data that are in the order of tens of millions of lines of code. A significant portion of the tools and scripts are legacy codes that have been shared among generations of engineers and are hard to replace.

From a high-level point of view, the design tools, scripts, and data can be grouped into following four main categories, in which the first two categories are part of the CAD design tools development environment and the last two categories are part of the microprocessor design project environment:

1. Design Tools: A set of internally developed and external vendor CAD tools that are tightly coupled by UNIX-centric "glue" scripts into a tool suite.
2. Gluing Utilities: These are scripts and small programs that integrate the various tool components in a tool suite into a functional design environment for microprocessor designs at Intel. Some of the tasks include internal to external tools data format translation, data extraction from netlists, simulation, wave form analysis, and design database management.
3. Microprocessor Design Project Utilities: Sets of scripts and programs developed by design automation engineers in design projects to validate design logic, process design data, generate design models, analyze performance, etc.
4. Designer Private Utilities: Scripts and programs developed by individual design engineers to aid them in their work such as analyzing and filtering design data, generating test stimuli, running tools in a particular sequence, etc.

This complex environment is represented in Figure 2.

In the next sections we describe the technical challenges we faced while developing CAD design flows in a mixed NT-UNIX environment, and we outline some of the innovative technical solutions we adopted to overcome these challenges.