In the past two decades, the simulated annealing technique has been considered as a powerful approach to handle many NP-hard optimization problems in VLSI designs. Recently, a new Monte Carlo and optimization technique, named simulated tempering, was invented and has been successfully applied to many scientific problems, from random field Ising modeling to the traveling salesman problem. It is ...

During the last decade database systems are used to represent spatial information mainly in the twodimensional plane or the three-dimensional space. Applications that rely on spatial databases can be found in CAD-CAM, VLSI, robotics, historical databases, geographical information systems, architectural sciences, visual perception and autonomous navigation, tracking, environmental protection and...

This paper describes a project to develop Java applets that use graphics and animation to aid in teaching VLSI CAD algorithms. Current applets illustrate routing using the Left Edge Algorithm and Lee Algorithm and placement using simulated annealing. Additional applets are planned for the future.

This paper presents SIRENA, a CAD environment for the simulation and modeling of mixed-signal VLSI parallel processing chips based on Cellular Neural Networks. SIRENA includes capabilities for: a) the description of nominal and non-ideal operation of CNN analog circuitry at the behavioral level; b) performing realistic simulations of the transient evolution of physical CNNs including deviations...

Many problems in computer-aided design of highly integrated circuits (CAD for VLSI) can be transformed to the task of manipulating objects over nite domains. The eeciency of these operations depends substantially on the chosen data structures. In the last years, ordered binary decision diagrams (OBDDs) have proven to be a very eecient data structure in this context. Here, we give a survey on th...

Binary decision diagrams have been shown as a powerful paradigm in handling Boolean functions and have been applied to many fields such as VLSI CAD, AI, combinatorics, etc. This paper proposes a new operation on an ordered binary decision diagram (OBDD), called reordering, and demonstrates its usefulness with presenting an extended algorithmic framework of applying OBDDs to combinatorial graph ...

The growing importance of VLSI is getting much attention. But the increasing complexity of VLSI also creates lots of problems for the computer scientists to work on. If there is no other new way to help the designers, the whole design process will get more difficult to maintain. That's the need for an object-oriented (OO) design framework for CAD world. Not only to develop new methods is needed...

Most parallel algorithms for VLSI CAD proposed to date have one important drawback: they work eeciently only on machines that they were designed for. As a result, algorithms designed to date are dependent on the architecture for which they are developed and do not port easily to other parallel architectures. This paper describes a new project under way to address this problem. We have developin...