O-2 ADL: An object-oriented analog VLSI design language

Object technology can be applied to analog VLSI design to exploit circuit compositional hierarchy, design process hierarchy and design module reuse. Conventional Object-Oriented programming languages are not suitable for such application due to the difficulties in describing VLSI circuit behaviour, modelling design technology/process hierarchy, implementing class name sharing and dynamically configuring design database. To overcome these difficulties, we have developed an Object-Oriented analog VLSI design language which provides a set of high-level constructs to conveniently describe and design VLSI circuits. A number of new concepts have been introduced in O(2)ADL and a Dynamic-and-Selective Inheritance algorithm has been developed to model the design technology/process, to reduce the size of the design database and to achieve code sharing and reusability.