. Mathematical Methods in VLSI Design

Early in the system design process, a design method must be chosen. This choice is usually dictated by what methods the designer has previously used, not by an open selection process. In this paper we provide descriptions of some available design methods and examples of their use. In this project we will develop benchmark problems that will be solved by a variety of design methods. We will identify characteristics of problems that might make one system design method more or less appropriate. The top-level question we wish to answer is "For which type of problem is each method best?".

Structured Analysis (using Entity Relationship Diagrams, Data Flow Diagrams, and State Transition Diagrams with Ward-Mellor notation), Functional Decomposition, Object-Oriented Analysis with Shlaer/Mellor Notation, Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Booch Notation, an Operational Evaluation Modeling Directed Graph, and IDEF0. Each method was used by an expert user of that method. The solutions presented make it obvious that the choice of a design method greatly effects the resulting system design.
Dynamic power is a major component in the overall power dissipation of aCMOS circuit. It can be reduced by minimizing the number of transitions ofsignals. Besides the logic transitions, glitches (or hazards) also consume power.

The glitch power elimination objective is successfully incorporated into thestandard cell library based design flow. This was done without re-design of thelibrary. The new design flow is effective in designing minimum transient energystandard cell based digital CMOS circuits. Due to the high level of automationthe flow permits, the performance of a standard cell based design is improved
without sacrificing the fast design cycle time feature.