Intermediate Format Standardization: Ambiguities, Deficiencies, Portability issues, Documentation and Improvements

The growth in VLSI technology demands more capabilities from CAD tools. This requires betterintegrated environments and more design portability across platforms and tools. The move towards hardware description languages in recent years and the issue of intellectual property and interoperability puts a pressure on EDA vendors to come up with a well-defined standard intermediate format. The draft AIRE/CE intermediate format, as distributed publicly on the Web, is one such standard. Although this standard may be better defined and better documented than any other proposed standards for this purpose, it has shortcomings that must be resolved before it is adapted by the EDA vendors and designers. This paper focuses on the AIRE weaknesses and presents our solutions according to our experiences with the AIRE implementation.