PARALLEL PROCESSING, SPECIAL-PURPOSE HARDWARE, AND DA APPLICATIONS.

Abstract

Continuing advances in VLSI technology are putting major pressure on Design Automation (DA) applications. To meet this pressure, special purpose hardware to perform selected DA applications has been developed and proposed. Much of the advantage of such hardware comes from exploiting the massive parallelism that is available in virtually all DA applications. However, it is impractical to construct special purpose machines to solve all, or even a significant number of these applications. Instead, DA should be viewed as a major, important application area for the new generation of less specialized parallel machines being proposed.