According to the Semiconductor Industry Association's 1999 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, by the year 2008 the integration of more than 500 million transistors will be possible on a single chip. Integrating transistors on silicon will depend increasingly on design reuse.

Design reuse techniques have become the subject of books, conferences, and podium discussions over the last few years. However, most discussions focus on higher-level abstraction like RTL descriptions, which can be synthesized. Design reuse is often seen as an add-on to normal design activity,...