should design effort be specific to tools or generic about hammer HOT 4 OPEN

I think design effort should be generic, and a number system seems very reasonable.

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Perhaps another option is to use a number system by default and allow 'expert users' to override the effort levels for a specific tool.

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OK that seems to match our current set of apis where we expose some nice api but "experts" are free to override as they see fit.

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Synopsys tools use "low", "medium", and "high" to varying degrees of support (some only support low and high, but some support all 3) and granularity (most "steps" support independent effort, so I can run a design with low placement effort but high routing effort). As a first pass, it would be nice to just have one global effort, I think. Number system is fine, though the range should be quite small (1-10 or even smaller).

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