Overview (History, motivation, outstanding features)

History:

AUT EDA Group was established in 2000 at the Department of Computer Engineering and Information Technology, Amirkabir University of Technology.

Motivation:

The mission of this group is education and research on Electronic design automation (EDA) physical design algorithms and methods, analysis and design of new physical design algorithms and newly goes to develop automatic layout tools.

Outstanding features:

A physical design tool, called ATLAS (Automatic Tool for Layout Synthesis) has been developed in this lab. ATLAS is a full physical synthesis tool for automatic standard cell layout generation. It supports partitioning, floor-planning, placement, clock routing, power routing, global routing and detailed routing and final GDSII generation of a digital design. ATLAS core is a micro-kernel with two efficient user interfaces (i.e..scriptive and graphical) and a plug-in mechanism to easily attach to any external tool to it (Fig 1).

Fig 1. ATLAS system structure

ATLAS Plug-in Environment (APLE) provides a felxible mechanism to connect any other tool to ATLAS kernel. APLE connects any new tool via a scripting interpreter (TCL). Using TCL, the tools which are attached to ATLAS and their configuration can be changed at run time. Therefore, the designer can change design flow and algorithm types easily at run time.

ATLAS uses a centralized and in-memory database called atlasDB for all levels of physical design information. atlasDB is an object-oriented database that provides full type coverage and systematic API mechanism to data retrieving and data manipulation on atlasDB.

ATLAS has two user interfaces: a shell user interface and a graphical user interface. In the shell user interface, the designer can execute all operations using shell commands that is very effective in electronic design automation (EDA). In graphical user interface, operations can be accessed via graphical menus and user-friendly views on placement, routing and layout can be created.

ATLAS algorithms support all required functionalities to automatic creation of the layout. It contains floor-planning, partitioning, cell placer, PAD placer, clock, power, global and detailed router and analyzers in various levels of design hierarchy.

ATLAS input and output formats are fully de-facto standards. It supports DEF and EDIF for design, LEF for library, GCF and SDF for constraints and delays and GDSII for layout.

Features

  Highly modular

By using APLE, any new engine can be easily plugged into ATLAS micro-kernel. ATLAS Plug-in Builderutility was developed to automatically attach any new tool to ATLAS.

  Centralized in-memory DB

atlasDB is a universal, flexible, centeralized and in-memory database for physical design information, including atlasDesign for design information, atlasLib, atlasTech for library and technology items, atlasDelay for delay information and atlasCon for constraints.

   Standard input/output format

All input and output formats are widely used and industrial de-facto formats. These standards are LEF/DEF for design and library, GCF for constraints, SDF for delay and GDSII for layout.

   High quality design engines

All physical design algorithms are novel approaches that are innovated and validated by academic researches.

   Linux-based platform

ATLAS was designed and implemented based on Linux OS, because of the more increasing interest to Linux EDA.

   User friendly user interfaces

ATLAS has two user interfaces, shell user interface is suitable for batch processing and graphical user interface for interactive design activities.

   High performance Qt-based GUI

Qt library is an industrial library to implement the GUI in EDA tools. This library is portable to Linux, Solaris and Windows.

Research focus/goals:

The main focus of research in this lab is electronic design automation. Related research areas include biological design automation (BDA), hardware security issues and chip authentication, reconfigurable systems, physical design automation.

Equipments

Research projects:

People (Education, Specialty);

Photo Gallery :

People:

http://ceit.aut.ac.ir/EDA/members.htm

experimental/equipment setup:

 Posters from conferences:

.

List of industrial project:

• ATLAS: Automatic Tool for LAyout Synthesis
• FPGA Chip Design
• RFID Reader Design