The decisions, or invariants, which are implicitly encoded into the design environment, or framework, can ease its use and evolution, or they can seriously interfere with the end purpose.  Learn how to expose the questions that determine your framework’s implicit rules.

The venerable Make program can be harnessed for even complex hardware build systems.  See how Make’s inherent, albeit sometimes confusing, capabilities can be exploited.

Today’s fast-moving, fast-changing physical design environment demands a strong foundation.  Learn how to use common Unix tools to tame the design tool and data management beast.

Using Make for more involved projects may involve target prerequisites built by Make.  Here we show you how to conditionally rebuild an intermediate target when the user adjusts build parameters on the Make command line.

Using multiple source locations for target prerequisites may not be that interesting or difficult for you, but when you want or need to cache these files locally, Make requires a bit more cleverness.