Patent · US Expired

Fitting for incremental compilation of electronic designs

US6102964A · kind A · utility

43Cited by
33References
40Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventors

Key dates

Filing dateOct 27, 1997
Grant dateAug 15, 2000
Priority date
Expiry dateOct 27, 2017

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC Y)Emerging Cross-Sectional Technologies
  • CPC primaryY10S707/99954
  • WIPO fieldComputer technology
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

A technique is disclosed for efficiently placing logic cells from an electronic design during an incremental recompile. This is accomplished by fixing in place as many logic cells as possible during the recompile procedure. To understand how this works, recognize than an "original electronic design" has already been fully compiled. Now, a user has made one or more changes to the original electronic design to produce a "changed electronic design." The disclosed technique fits the changed electronic design, during incremental recompile, without effecting too much of the logic previously fit during compilation of the original electronic design. Initially, a compiler attempts to fit logic cells of the changed portion of the electronic design onto available logic elements of the hardware device while confining logic cells from the unchanged portion of the changed electronic design to their original positions. If this fails, the compiler allows logic cells from the unchanged portion of the changed electronic design to shift by a limited amount to other logic elements within the target hardware device. At first, this shifting is fairly constrained in order to preserve as much of the origi…

Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.