Examples of Dependency Graphs

The dependency graph is also called design trace. This page shows some examples of what a trace may look like.

Layout Flow using Octtools

The first trace refers to the flow used to produce a VLSI standard-cell layout using the "Octtools" from UC-Berkeley. The top left node represents the file counter.bds, which is the high-level description of a 5-bit counter. This description is processed by the tools bdsyn, mis, padplace, and wolfe, to produce the layout in counter:wolfe:contents. The last tool, chipstats, measures area and total net-length of the layout.

We regret that the labels on each node are not easily readable in this GIF image.

This is a simplified version of the flow. If you execute the flow under VOV's supervision, the actual design trace will be extended at run-time with about 20 more files.

Software Compilation

The second trace shows the dependencies between 1948 files and 835 tool invocations required to produce the Linux and IBM-AIX version of VOV (the arcs are not shown). Notice the large amount of parallelism available in this project.

This is only a small part of the trace for the VOV development. As of 01/31/96, the complete trace includes 11800 files and more than 7000 tool invocations.

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