Early matching of system requirements and package capabilities

The benefits of early package wirability analysis to the large system design process are discussed. The authors show that preliminary design exploration coupled with appropriate prediction tools provide designers with a powerful early evaluation methodology. PEPPER, an interactive package design and performance prediction tool, is described, which allows designers to quickly analyze system and technology tradeoffs very early in the design cycle. PEPPER has been evaluated on a number of large system components and the results have been very encouraging in terms of accurately predicting package wiring characteristics as well as providing insight into package design.