"...we finally made
the decision that we should go with automatic place and route. Neither one of those things existed at
Intel and the concern was could we get it done in time and would it blow up the areas of the chip so that
they wouldn’t fit and then it would all fall apart and we’d have to do it by hand. So what we did, we got an
automatic placement program from a grad student at Berkeley, it was called Timberwolf and we checked
it out and it seemed to do an adequate job so we had his software. He moved to MIT to work on another
project and we actually had a terminal set up in his campus room where he’d fix bugs in the auto
placement program as they came up. But luckily the whole thing came together and worked. There are
several points in time where we’d get stuck and have to be waiting for him to fix his program. So that
would take the individual cells and put them within a rectangle in an optimal situation for speed.
"...I was just going point out that if management had known that we were using a tool by some grad
student as the key part of the methodology, they would never have let us use it."
EDIT: I didn't realize that Right-o had an article on i386 place and route with standard cells that also links to the panel interview. The specific areas of the i386 die that used standard cells are identified.
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Hist...
"...we finally made the decision that we should go with automatic place and route. Neither one of those things existed at Intel and the concern was could we get it done in time and would it blow up the areas of the chip so that they wouldn’t fit and then it would all fall apart and we’d have to do it by hand. So what we did, we got an automatic placement program from a grad student at Berkeley, it was called Timberwolf and we checked it out and it seemed to do an adequate job so we had his software. He moved to MIT to work on another project and we actually had a terminal set up in his campus room where he’d fix bugs in the auto placement program as they came up. But luckily the whole thing came together and worked. There are several points in time where we’d get stuck and have to be waiting for him to fix his program. So that would take the individual cells and put them within a rectangle in an optimal situation for speed.
"...I was just going point out that if management had known that we were using a tool by some grad student as the key part of the methodology, they would never have let us use it."
EDIT: I didn't realize that Right-o had an article on i386 place and route with standard cells that also links to the panel interview. The specific areas of the i386 die that used standard cells are identified.
https://www.righto.com/2024/01/intel-386-standard-cells.html