1. DESIGN FLOW Integrated circuit (IC) complexity is steadily increasing. ICs incorporating hundreds of millions of transistors, mega-bit memories, complicated pipelined structures, etc., are now in high demand. For example, Intel Itanium II processor contains more than 200 million transistors, including a 3 MB third level cache. A billion transistor IC was said to be "imminently doable" by Intel fellow J. Crawford at Microprocessor Forum in October...