CHAPTER 4

DESIGN PROCESS FLOWS AND SOFTWARE TOOLS

The purpose of this chapter is to:

• Describe the functionality of design tools, both generic and those appropriate to a field-programmable gate-array (FPGA)
• Describe some typical examples, from start to finish, of design process flows, using manufacturer-supplied cases. For simplicity only single-chip designs will be used at this stage. We include schematic-based, behavioral-and floorplan-based examples.