PICSIL A Data Flow Approach to Silicon Compilation

Integrated Circuits with over one million transistors are now common, and the current doubling of circuit density every two years seems likely to continue. Consequently, VLSI design has become a major bottleneck in new product development. SSI and MSI design methods are quite inadequate. The design of one 60,000-transistor chip took 15 technical experts three years and cost several million dollars (Johnson & Mazor, 1984). Developing a chip under these constraints in a competitive market is a gamble, and chips with long development times are likely to be outmoded by the time they appear. Developers play safe, choosing conventional, inefficient, architectures rather than risking developing new ones and incurring prohibitive design costs. Small custom runs are rarely worthwhile.