MDE-based FPGA physical design: fast model-driven prototyping with Smalltalk

The integrated circuit industry continues to progress rapidly deepening the gap in between the technological breakthroughs and the electronic design automation industry. This gap is even more problematic in the context of physical design, the last automation level between applications and the technology. The challenges of meeting the physical and performance constraints necessitate innovation at the algorithmic level, and at the methodological level. This study presents a methodological approach to physical design automation relying on model-driven engineering. Relying on the flexibility, and adaptability of the Smalltalk environment we propose an agile framework enabling fast physical design tool-flow prototyping. We illustrate our approach by using the Madeo FPGA toolkit as a legacy codebase that is incrementally changed to adopt this model-driven development strategy. Some pragmatic achievements are presented to illustrate the principal axes of this approach: algorithmic improvements through plug-and-play routines, domain-model extension for emerging technologies, as well as model evolution toward a meta-described environment.