Preface
Technology has advanced up to a point where almost anyone with the right tools and knowledge could do what
few years ago was the task of a group of specialists armed with powerful workstations and very high expensive
software tools. Nowadays we have powerful and inexpensive computers and very elaborate open source software
that open us many ways to do different things. This is true not only in the field of web page design, movie
production, music composition, and many other fields, but also in digital circuit design.
Today we could do some basic research work or test innovative circuit designs with free design software tools.
However since many of the available tools have been developed by volunteers and/or researchers and educators
as a mean for teaching and/or research, they almost always lack of adecuate documentation for those beginning
to look into the field of digital circuit design and who are in need of detailed information to use those tools in
education, basic design and/or test of circuits.
In this book we target the Alliance tools developed at LIP6 of the Pierre and Marie Curie University of Paris
since it is a complete set of tools covering many steps of the design process of a VLSI circuit. The authors of this
book want to contribute, with its grain of salt, by putting together some of the information that is dispersed in
a way that even beginners could benefit from it.
This bo ok is free and is made available to any person that want to use it in a course or for personal
education. The print and sold of this book for any lucrative purpose is prohibited. However, you can freely
print or reproduce the book or part of it for educative and/or non lucrative purposes. You do not need to
previously contact us in this case, provided you include the front page and this preface with the corresponding
copies.
The content of the book is very ambitious and we hope others will feel motivated to contribute to its
enhancement. You can add, modify and enhance it at your will provided you reach all the modifications to
the authors to make them publicly available (In the same spirit of the GPL license for software). We have
exhaustively reviewed the content of the book, but we know that there must be some corrections left. If you
find any error and/or omission, or have any suggestion or idea, please feel free to contact any of us. We will try
to include it (them) in new editions of the book.
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