Computer aided design tools play an important role in
design and manufacture of today's VLSI systems. The performance of
these tools critically depend on the architecture of the machines on
which they are run. Hence it is important for the VLSI designers to
know which machines are good for their applications. Therefore, there
is a need to have a suite of benchmarks which reflects the performance
of different machines on CAD applications. The current
standard benchmark suite, SPEC95, contains CAD applications which are
completely outdated in the sense that they are no longer
representative of applications in CAD domain.
In this work, we attempt to
i) Create a benchmark suite consisting of CAD tools representative of the
workload in today's design methodology,
ii) Benchmark a collection of state-of-the-art architectures from various
computer vendors on these applications,
iii) Investigate the effects of memory hierarchy on the performance
of machines on CAD applications
