Hammer: Enabling Reusable Physical Design

A lack of reusable physical design methodologies in ASIC design contributes to high design effort and costs. We posit that traditional flows suffer from a lack of separation between logical design, physical design, technology, and tool concerns,preventing effective re-use. We introduce Hammer, a physical design generator which remedies these problems via separation of concerns. In addition, Hammer addresses the needs of users to achieve practical re-usability using the principles of incremental adoption, system evolution, and abstraction with modularity. We elucidate how the design of Hammer separates concerns to enable usability, and walk through examples of how the principles of Hammer facilitate and contribute to open-source re-use and sharing in the domain of physical design.