Upgrading the Graphical User Interface of a Commercial Software used for Low Power Chip Design

Abstract

The Graphical User Interface or GUI [1], is a type of interface that allows users to interact with electronics devices through graphical icons and visual indicators such as secondary notation, as opposed to text-based interfaces, typed command labels or text navigation. Electronic design automation (EDA) is the category of tools for designing and produc- ing electronic systems ranging from printed circuit boards (PCBs) to integrated circuits. As device sizes are shrinking and chip capacity is increasing, designing these 100 million transistors SoC is becoming a challenge. This is causing a paradigm shift in the EDA design ow causing the designers to move up in the abstraction level. This has warranted new EDA tools in the system-level design and veri cation arena. The goal of Calypto is to provide a suite of system-level tools. All these tools will be built on a robust and common infrastructure. Calyptos tool PowerPro is being used for the project. It automates power reduction in RTL designs. Power consumption is a design requirement for all electronic applications. PowerPro is an automated RTL power optimization solution that dynamically reduces power with little or no impact on timing or area. In this project we propose a transfor- mation so that the circuit can be represented in a format where a single object would be able to represent information about diferent bits. The GUI of PowerPro is developed using Qt which is a cross-platform application framework and C++ GUI toolkit created and maintained byTrolltech. It provides ap- plication developers with all the functionality needed to build applications with state-of- the-art graphical user interfaces. Qt is fully object-oriented, easily extensible, and allows true component programming. The main objective of doing this project is to make the GUI of PowerPro available in the latest available version of Qt. We are trying to migrate from the older version of Qt to the latest one so that we can fulfill the contemporary requirements of the industry. The newer available version of Qt has some new libraries that provides the software a much faster runtime and makes it able to solve the complex problems in a much lesser span of time. This migration was indeed required for the companys upcoming releases of the software.