by John A. Darringer, Daniel Brand, John V. Gerbi, William H. Joyner,Jr., Louise Trevillyan
Please note: This previously published IBM Journal of Research and Development paper was reprinted for this special retrospective issue.
For some time we have been exploring methods of transforming functional specifications into hardware implementations that are suitable for production. The complexity of this task and the potential value have continued to grow with the increasing complexity of processor design and the mounting pressure to shorten machine design times. This paper describes the evolution of the Logic Synthesis System from an experimental tool to a production system for the synthesis of masterslice chip implementations. The system was used by one project in IBM Poughkeepsie to produce 90 percent of its more than one hundred chip parts. The primary reasons for this success are the use of local transformations to simplify logic representations at several levels of abstraction, and a highly cooperative effort between logic designers and synthesis system designers to understand the logic design process practiced in Poughkeepsie and to incorporate this knowledge into the synthesis system.
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