Nikes Software Architecture and Infrastructure: Enabling Integrated Solutions for Gigahertz Designs

This paper shows how software architecture and data modeling techniques are used as core attributes of a CAD tool suite. We discuss the issues that have influenced Nike’s architectural direction, such as technology trends, processor architecture trends, and computing platform trends. We identify some of the major drawbacks of existing tool suites and show how Nike architecture addresses these. Lastly, we describe how we developed a software infrastructure in order to support and facilitate the code sharing necessary to implement the designed architecture. The standard software development environment is described, including the tools and methodologies that are uniformly deployed to all Nike developers.