| Design Flow Database |
Welcome to the NCSU VLSI Design Flow Database. The goal of this site is to improve the documentation of VLSI design-flows and encourage the adoption of documentation standards. For information on how to create and post your own design flows, follow the flow2html link below.
2004
- SSHAFT Single-Cell Synthesis Place & Route by W. R. Davis
2005
- SSHAFT Simple Place & Route by W. R. Davis
Prerelease
The flows collected here are in progress and have access restricted until the authors decide that they are ready to be released.- 3DIC Phase 1 Place & Route Flow by H. Hua, C. Mineo, S. Melamed, and W. R. Davis
flow2html
The design-flows on this site were created with a Python (ver 2.4) script called flow2html.py. The script is basically a wrapper for dot (ver 2.2.1), which is distributed with the Graphviz Graph Visualization Toolset from AT&T. Please feel free to use the script to document your flows, but we ask that you send your flows back to us to be posted on this web-site. Ultimately, we hope that the open publication of high-quality documentation will eliminate the "not invented here" problem of sharing design methodologies.Installation
Graphviz executable distributions are available for Redhat Linux and Windows. Installation instructions are given here for Windows, but Linux installation should be similar. Furthermore, the instructions here assume that you have installed Cygwin with the interpreters->python option. Some modification of these instructions will be necessary if you install Python separately from Cygwin.- After you install the Graphviz package, download and copy the flow2html.py script into the bin directory along with the other Graphviz executables. On my system, this directory is "C:\Program Files\ATT\Graphviz\bin".
- Download the flowdb_small.gif image and copy it to a permanent place. On my system, I put it in a directory called "C:\Program Files\ATT\flow2html".
- Ensure that the line that begins with imagedir=... close to the top of the flow2html.py script points to the directory where you saved the image in the previous step.
- Ensure that the Graphviz binary directory is in your search path. There are a number of ways to do this, but I do it by going to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Environment Variables and editing the "Path" system variable.
Tutorial
A brief tutorial of the systax is forthcoming, but in the meantime, the syntax is fairly self-explanatory. You can generate the 2004 SSHAFT Single-Cell Synthesis Place & Route documentation above by downloading, unzip-ing, and untar-ing the spr.pl.tar.gz file, changing to the directory, and typing "flow2html.py spr.pl.flow".Contributors
- W. Rhett Davis, NC State University
- Hao Hua, NC State University
- Samson Melamed, NC State University
- Christopher Mineo, NC State University
- Ambarish Sule, NC State University