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VLSI Design Flow

 


                                     Figure-: A  simplified view of VLSI design flow.

Figure  depicts the VLSI design flow in a more condensed manner, taking into account the various design representations, or abstractions  such as design- behavioural, logic, circuit, and mask layout. It's worth noting that concept verification is crucial at any stage of this procedure.Failure to properly verify a design in its early stages often results in substantial and costly re-design at a later level, increasing time-to-market.

Although the design process has been represented in a linear fashion for ease of understanding, there are several iterations back and forth in practise, particularly between any two neighbouring steps, and sometimes even between pairs of steps that are far apart. Although top-down design flow is effective at controlling the design process, there is no completely unidirectional top-down design flow. It is essential to incorporate top-down and bottom-up approaches. For example, if a chip designer specified an architecture without carefully estimating the corresponding chip region, the resulting chip layout is very likely to exceed the available technology's area limit.In this case, some functions may have to be removed and the design process may have to be replicated in order to fit the architecture into the available chip region. Such changes could necessitate major changes to the original specifications. As a result, it's important to get low-level data to higher levels (bottom up) as soon as possible. 

We'll look at design methodologies and systematic methods that have been built over time to deal with both complex hardware and software projects in the following sections. The fundamental concepts of formal design would increase the chances of success regardless of the project's size. The classical techniques for reducing the complexity of IC design are: Hierarchy, regularity, modularity and locality.




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