Organizing and Planning the Asic Design Process by Means of a Multi-Agent System

Abstract

Because of constantly improving technologies, the complexity of Integrated Circuits (ICs) is continuously increasing. Consequently IC design becomes continously more challenging and complex. A huge number of different possible design flows exists, delimited by different constraints. The design flow dynamically changes as recursions between design tasks occur. An approach that allows a fast and efficient ASIC design and that can deal with this huge complexity and dynamics is needed. Therefore we propose a methodology based on a multi-agent simulation combined with global and local scheduling techniques to construct a time-dependent, detailed model of the ASIC design process, which permits an extensive analysis and efficient organization.