Palladio: An Expert Assistant for Integrated Circuit Design

The most widely used description level in integrated circuit design is the artwork or layout level. This level describes integrated circuits in terms of "colored rectangles" (representing material on a chip) that can be composed to build up large designs. Associated with the colored rectangle terms of the layout level is a set of composition rules, called layout design rules. The layout composition rules provide a simple shallow model of composition that is based on a deep model of electrical properties and fabrication tolerances. If designers follow these rules, their designs are guaranteed to have adequate physical spacing on a chip [3, 4].