SBIR-STTR Award

This proposal presents ideas and a plan of new technology development for addressing packaging and other technology issues in electronic system design . The proposed work has as its objective, the implementation of a rapid prototyping environment that consists of a set of tools supporting hardware design meeting specific reliability, packaging, and performance constraints. It supports adding changes, changing modularity, reuse, abstraction, and constraint propagation, features that are necessary in any rapid prototypeing environment. The proposed environment will be built around a hierarchical graphical tool that will be used to develop layers of hardware descriptions involving interconnect, packaging, and performance data.

Solving a packaging problem has been described as a search for an optimum in a sea of constraints. We propose a rapid prototyping environment, Adabra, that provides packaging solutions at the carrier, card and system level. Adabra uses a formalism known as Parameter Propagation Network (PPN) to embed technology specific information. The formalism is uniform across technologies, but can be customized to individual technologies, and is used in Adabra to design a packaging solution. The core of Adabra's prototyping environment consists of a propagator engine that propagates data values across Parameter Propagation Networks. Other features include a graphical user interface, a server to connect to third party tools, and a build architecture. A separate maintenance architectures allows the integration of new PPN's to update Adabra's technology base. Adabra will be implemented in two parts: the first part will provide carrier and mcm design solution capability, the second part will provide pcb design capability and bring the implementation to the status of a product.