Hardware Component Modeling: (5 Current Issues in Electronic Modeling)

The VITAL specification addresses the issues of interoperability, backannotation and high performance simulation for sign-off quality ASIC libraries in VHDL. VITAL provides modeling guidelines and a set of pre-defined packages (containing pre-defined routines for modeling functionality and timing) to facilitate the acceleration of designs which use cells from a VITAL library. The VITAL Level-I guidelines constrain the modeling capabilities provided by VHDL in order to facilitate higher performance (Figure I). Accumulating "gains" Constrained "flexibility" Higher performance & Increased capacity Benefits Flexibility FujI VHDL 1076 Figure 1: VHDL and VITAL Even within the Level-I guidelines, there are several ways in which a model can be written. In this chapter, we highlight the various modeling trade-offs and provide guidelines which can be used for developing efficient models. We will also discuss the techniques that can be used by tool developers to accelerate the simulation of VIT AL­ based designs. 2.2. OVERVIEW OF A VITAL LEVEL-l ARCIDTECTURE The VITAL specification is versatile enough to support several modeling styles e.g., distributed delay style, pin-to-pin delay style etc. In general, a VITAL Level-I model can have the structure illustrated in Figure 2.

Table of Contents:
1. The History of Vital: VHDL Asic Library Update.- 1.1. Introduction.- 1.2. VITAL Development.- 1.3. VITAL Principles.- 1.4. Market Impact.- 1.5. Observations.- 1.6. Summary.- 2. Issues in Efficient Modeling and Acceleration of Vital Models.- 2.1. Introduction.- 2.2. Overview of a VITAL Level-1 Architecture.- 2.3. Impact of Modeling Styles on Simulation Performance.- 2.4. Elements of Acceleration.- 2.5. Acceleration Strategies.- 2.6. Impact of Implementation Technologies.- 2.7. Conclusions.- 3. Standards for Interoperability and Portability.- 3.1. Introduction.- 3.2. Design Methodology with VHDL.- 3.3. Requirements for Design for Durability.- 3.4. Requirements for Board Level Simulation.- 3.5. Conclusion.- 4. Abstract Data Types and the Digital System Description and Simulation Environments.- 4.1. Introduction.- 4.2. Background and Related Work.- 4.3. Extended VHDL Packages.- 4.4. Finite State Machines (FSMs).- 4.5. The Description of Clocks.- 4.6. Petri Nets.- 4.7. Conclusions.- 5. Modeling Highly Flexible and Self-Generating Parameterizable Components in VHDL.- 5.1. Introduction.- 5.2. Fundamentals.- 5.3. Modeling of Different Parameter Classes in VHDL.- 5.4. Case Study.- 5.5. Functional Verification of Parameterizable Components.- 5.6. Conclusion.- 5.7. Acknowledgments.- 6. Melody: An Efficient Layout-Based Model Generator.- 6.1. Introduction.- 6.2. The Generation of Structural Models.- 6.3. Functional Simulation.- 6.4. Experiments.- 6.5. Conclusion.- 7. Quality Measures & Analysis: A Way to Improve VHDL Models.- 7.1. Introduction.- 7.2. The SAVE Project.- 7.3. Efficiency.- 7.4. Complexity Analysis.- 7.5. Synthesizability.- 7.6. Conclusions.- 8. Modern Concepts of Quality and Their Relationship to Design Reuse and Model Libraries.- 8.1. Introduction.- 8.2. Quality.-8.3. Quality-Driven Design.- 8.4. Design Reuse.- 8.5. Quality-Driven Design and Model Libraries.- 8.6. Validation of Library Models.- 8.7. Conclusion.