VLSI Design

VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) refers to the trend of integrating circuits into silicon chips. A typical example is the smartphone. The modern trend of shrinking transistor sizes, allowing engineers to fit more and more transistors into the same area of silicon, has pushed the integration of more and more functions of cellphone circuitry into a single silicon die (i.e. plate). This enabled the modern cellphone to mature into a powerful tool that shrank from the size of a large brick-sized unit to a device small enough to comfortably carry in a pocket or purse, with a video camera, touchscreen, and other advanced features.

Usage

Setup the virtual environment

This project is executed in a virtual environment created using pipenv, so the first thing to do will be to install it:

pip install pipenv

To activate the virtual environment, go inside the /cdmo_vlsi folder and run:

pipenv shell

Once the virtual environment is activated, you must install all the required packages for the project, which can be done by running:

pipenv install -r requirements.txt

Now, all the packages should be installed. Ready to solve some instances

CP

In order to solve the instances by means of CP you should first move to the CP/src folder and then launch the solve_cp.py script, for which you can specify the following parameters:

python solve_cp.py [-h] [-s START] [-e END] [-t TIMEOUT] [-r]
               [--solver SOLVER] [--heu HEU] [--restart RESTART]

Command line arguments:

Argument	Description
-h, --help	Shows help message
-s START, --start START	First instance to solve (default: 1)
-e END, --end END	Last instance to solve (default: 40)
-t TIMEOUT, --timeout TIMEOUT	Sets the timeout (ms, default: 300000)
-r, --rotation	Enables circuits rotation (default: false)
--solver SOLVER	CP solver to use (gecode/chuffed, default: chuffed)
--heu HEU	CP search heuristic (input_order/first_fail/dom_w_deg, default: input_order)
--restart RESTART	CP restart strategy (none/lub/geom), default: none)

SAT

In order to solve the instances using SAT, you should move to the SAT/src folder and launch the solve_sat.py file. You can specify the following parameters:

python solve_sat.py [-h] [-s START] [-e END] [-t TIMEOUT] [-r] [-sb]

Command line arguments:

Argument	Description
-h, --help	Shows help message
-s START, --start START	First instance to solve (default: 1)
-e END, --end END	Last instance to solve (default: 40)
-t TIMEOUT, --timeout TIMEOUT	Sets the timeout (ms, default: 300000)
-r, --rotation	Enables circuits rotation (default: false)
--sb SIMMETRY_BREAKING	Enables symmetry breaking (default: false)

SMT

To solve the instances using SMT, you first have to move into the SMT/src folder, and launch the solve_smt.py script:

python solve_sm.py [-h] [-s START] [-e END] [-t TIMEOUT] [-r] [-sb]

The arguments are the same as for the SAT script

MIP

To solve the instances using SMT, you first have to move into the MIP/src folder, and launch the solve_mip.py script:

python solve_sm.py [-h] [-s START] [-e END] [-t TIMEOUT] [-r] [-sb]

The arguments are the same as for the SAT and SMT scripts