Current Issues in Electronic Modeling5- Hardware Component Modeling

VITAL provides modeling guidelines and a set of pre-defined packages (containing pre-defined routines for modeling functionality and timing) to facilitate the acceleration of designs which use cells from a VITAL library. Highlighting the current status of the modelling of electronic components, this text focuses on four topics: standards, data types, model generation and quality assurance. Three chapters on standards include an introduction to VITAL (an IEEE standard), its application and some of the issues in using and implementing it. Other standards are also covered. One chapter on model generation describes a model generator for reusable component models and another describes a generator which takes actual physical data as its source and which generates a functional model. Two chapters are devoted to improving the quality of models. One introduces a method for quantifying aspects of model quality and the other introduces quality concepts which can lead to an increase in model value through reuse and robustness.