Abstract: The present invention provides a method for determining timing delays associated with the placement and routing delays of an integrated circuit. In particular, the present invention determines the area of each region wherein a region includes a group or subgroup of circuit elements for use in designing an integrated circuit. Once the area for each region is obtained, substantially more accurate and more design specific wireload model and net parasitics can be obtained. The wireload models or net parasitics can then be supplied to other CAE tools to create a modified netlist. Moreover, the present invention provides a process which allows the user to account for the RC time constant effects of wire delay on a hierarchical block basis thereby improving the accuracy of the wire placement and routing delay estimate while preserving the performance benefits of a traditional simplified equation.

Abstract: A method for defining an area of a computer screen (10). The defined area is specified as box (15) which the user may rigidly move vertically and horizontally and adjust both the width and height of the box (15). A single keystroke and motion of a mouse is sufficient to define the box (15), to resize the box (15) and to rigidly move the box (15).

Abstract: A rule based floorplanner for a macrocell array having a plurality of predetermined macrocells. The floorplanner uses a net list (23), a macrocell list (26), and a list of design constraints (31) and characteristics of the base array itself to derive an initial Burain score. A trial floorplan is attempted (33) and checked against a list of theoretical rules (39) and a list of empirical rules (38) to determine a measured Burain score (36) which accurately indicates the difficulty which can be expected when completing the design.