Essential Electronic Design Automation (EDA)

Synthesis Tools

Luigi:	With synthesis, which our last tool for discussion.
Nora:	I've heard synthesis mentioned, but I didn't quite understand it.
Luigi:	Synthesis is the bridge between abstract logical design and the concrete physical design. Most front-end design views are descriptions or graphic symbols of gates, flip-flops, registers, and memory blocks. (These are symbolic design views with little real physical design information.) However, real hardware is built with mask patterns used by the semiconductor manufacturer. These physical views describe the devices as they look on the masks and actual chip. The devices are the transistors, wires, resistors, and so forth. Their physical details such as length, height, and area are described in a ...