Description
Several methods of choosing appropriate sizes for transistors in a VLSI schematic to meet a specified delay criteria are considered. Simulated annealing and heuristic techniques are investigated. MOST is a Prolog program which makes use of information provided by the PTA timing analyzer to implement these various approaches. Both MOST and PTA are written entirely in (interpreted) Prolog; nonetheless, performance gains of over 50% as compared to an unsized circuit can be realized in a few minutes of CPU time. Using a simple RC timing model, heuristics are found to be more efficient than simulated annealing.