Integration with existing design environments

Although behavioral silicon compilation has made large strides toward the automation of VLSI design [3, 9], the use of such systems is currently very limited in industrial environments. The main problems are  

Functional units (FUs) are introduced in order to allow the mixing of behavior and structure. FUs allow the use of existing macro-blocks in the behavioral specification. 

An FU may execute a set of standard operations (which is the case for adders, multipliers, ALUs, etc.) or new customized operations introduced by the user. An FU may be a large complex block such as a cache memory or an I/O unit. It can be called from within a behavioral description in order to perform a 

The high-level synthesis view of the FU summarizes the behavioral and RTL views. It includes  

The synthesis environment can contain a library of such FUs. The designer invokes an FU through a simple procedure call, FUs can be of any degree of complexity and can themselves be the result of a synthesis process. 

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Finally, the realization of an integrated design environment with new, integrated, and synergistic functionality on top of existing tools was specifically difficult, as we aimed at tight integration and as we also tried to apply reuse techniques for tool implementation. 

The role of the subproject 13 of IMPROVE, as described in Sect. 5.7, was to coordinate the software development process of the integrated engineering design environment (cf. Fig. 5.55 on p. 558). Especially, it dealt with the development of a general framework for a-posteriori integration of existing tools. 

The system is usually customized to cover the specific needs of a laboratory (additional solvents, safety features, and integration into existing laboratory infrastructure) and is of stainless steel construction with only glass and Teflon contact areas to allow operation in a clean room environment. Software and hardware are designed specifically for compliant operation. 

In general, no tools exist which provide all functionalities presented in this section. Tjqjically, comparable systems offer only a part of the functions necessary for a comprehensive support of cooperative work. Furthermore, a common and simple usage of these systems is not possible. Furthermore, such environments do not integrate tools needed in a design process. Only with such an integration, communication tools can take special requirements of the design process into account and are able to hide technical details from the users. 

Chemicals that are released, either by design or accident, into the terrestrial environment come in contact with the soil, and the soil can possibly become a repository for the fugitive chemical. If this happens, the chemical could become an integral part of soil and thus move with the soil during erosion episodes, or the chemical could pass through soil profiles and come in contact with ground water. Of course, the possibility exists that the chemical can be degraded into less harmful byproducts. 

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