Improvement in the quality of integrated circuit designs and a designer's productivity can be achieved by a combination of two factors:

• Using more structured design methodologies for extensive reuse of existing components and subsystems. It seems that 70% of new designs correspond to existing components that cannot be reused because of a lack of methodologies and tools.
• Providing higher level design tools allowing to start from a higher level of abstraction. After the success and the widespread acceptance of logic and RTL synthesis, the next step is behavioral synthesis,...