{"title":"Meeting with the Forthcoming IC Design -- The Era of Power, Variability and NRE Explosion and a Bit of the Future --","authors":"T. Sakurai","doi":"10.1109/ASPDAC.2007.357773","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ASPDAC.2007.357773","url":null,"abstract":"In the foreseeable future, VLSI design will meet a couple of explosions: power, variability and NRE (non-recurring engineering cost). Some of the solutions for power-aware designs are covered in this talk with relation to variability. A remedy for the NRE explosion is to reduce the number of developments and manufacture and sell tens of millions of chips under a fixed design. System-in-a-Package approach may embody such possibility. Several new technologies are described to enable 3-dimensional stacking of chips to build high-performance yet lowpower electronics systems. On the other extreme of the silicon VLSI's which stay as small as a centimeter square, a new domain of electronics called large-area integrated circuit as large as meters is waiting, which may open up a new continent of applications in the era of ubiquitous electronics. One of the implementations of the large-area electronics is based on organic transistors. The talk will provide perspectives of the organic circuit design taking E-skin, sheet-type scanner and Braille display as examples.","PeriodicalId":362373,"journal":{"name":"2007 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125676358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
P. Gerin, Hao Shen, A. Chureau, A. Bouchhima, A. Jerraya
{"title":"Flexible and Executable Hardware/Software Interface Modeling for Multiprocessor SoC Design Using SystemC","authors":"P. Gerin, Hao Shen, A. Chureau, A. Bouchhima, A. Jerraya","doi":"10.1109/ASPDAC.2007.358017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ASPDAC.2007.358017","url":null,"abstract":"At high abstraction level, multi-processor system-on-chip (SoC) designs are specified as assembling of IP's which can be hardware or software. The refinement of communication between these different IP's, known as hardware/software interfaces, is widely seen as the design bottleneck due to their complexity. In order to perform early design validation and architecture exploration, flexible executable models of these interfaces are needed at different abstraction levels. In this paper, we define a unified methodology to implement executable models of the hardware/software interface based on SystemC. The proposed formalism based on the concept of services gives to this approach the flexibility needed for architecture exploration and the ability to be used in automatic generation tools. A case study of hardware/software interface modeling at the transaction accurate level is presented. Experimental results show that this method allows higher simulation speed with early performance estimation.","PeriodicalId":362373,"journal":{"name":"2007 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128224718","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Embedded Low Power/Cost 16-Bit Data/Instruction Microprocessor Compatible with ARM7 Software Tools","authors":"Fu-Ching Yang, Ing-Jer Huang","doi":"10.1109/ASPDAC.2007.358104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ASPDAC.2007.358104","url":null,"abstract":"A 16-bit THUMB instruction set microprocessor is proposed for low cost/power in short-precision computing. It achieves 40% gate count, 51% power consumption and 160% clock frequency comparing to ARM7, even the performance is 67% better in narrow width memory at the same clock frequency. The ARM7 software is also compatible.","PeriodicalId":362373,"journal":{"name":"2007 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference","volume":"89 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134425203","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Yuchun Ma, Zhuoyuan Li, J. Cong, Xianlong Hong, Glenn D. Reinman, Sheqin Dong, Qiang Zhou
{"title":"Micro-architecture Pipelining Optimization with Throughput-Aware Floorplanning","authors":"Yuchun Ma, Zhuoyuan Li, J. Cong, Xianlong Hong, Glenn D. Reinman, Sheqin Dong, Qiang Zhou","doi":"10.1109/ASPDAC.2007.358107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ASPDAC.2007.358107","url":null,"abstract":"For modern processor designs in nanometer technologies, both block and interconnect pipelining are needed to achieve multi-gigahertz clock frequency, but previous approaches consider block pipelining and interconnect pipelining separately. For example, all recent works on wire pipelining assume pre-pipelined components and consider only inserting pipeline stages on point-to-point wire or bus connections. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first that considers block pipelining and interconnect pipelining simultaneously. We optimize multiple critical paths or loops in the micro-architecture and insert the pipelines stages optimally in the blocks and wires of these loops to meet the clock frequency requirement. We propose two approaches to this problem. The first approach is based on mixed integer linear programming (MILP) which is theoretically guaranteed to produce the optimal solution, and the second one is an efficient graph-based algorithm that produces near-optimal solutions. Experimental results show that simultaneous block and interconnect pipelining leads to more than 20% improvement over wire-pipelining alone on the overall processor performance. Moreover, the graph-based approach gives solutions very close to the MILP results ( 2% more than MILP results on average) but in a much shorter runtime.","PeriodicalId":362373,"journal":{"name":"2007 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133415762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"DFM reality in sub-nanometer IC design","authors":"N. Verghese, P. Hurat","doi":"10.1109/ASPDAC.2007.357990","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ASPDAC.2007.357990","url":null,"abstract":"The impact of sub-nanometer (below 90nm) effects on IC designs needs to be clearly understood to ensure that (1) manufacturing variations are considered during design to avoid catastrophic failures, and (2) the expected performance simulated in design is actually realized on silicon to avoid parametric failures. This paper discusses design for manufacturing solutions that enable designers to predict systematic manufacturing variations during design to detect and repair catastrophic and parametric failures. This paper presents real examples of design sensitivities to sub-nanometer manufacturing variations and the need to correctly analyze, optimize and verify the design before manufacturing by using appropriate EDA solutions which bring the effects of manufacturing variations in the design flow.","PeriodicalId":362373,"journal":{"name":"2007 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133461561","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Creating Explicit Communication in SoC Models Using Interactive Re-Coding","authors":"Pramod Chandraiah, J. Peng, R. Dömer","doi":"10.1109/ASPDAC.2007.357791","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ASPDAC.2007.357791","url":null,"abstract":"Communication exploration has become a critical step during SoC design. Researchers in the CAD community have proposed fast and efficient techniques for comprehensive design space exploration to expedite this critical design step. Although these advances have been helpful in reducing the design time significantly, the overall design time of the system is still a bottleneck. All these techniques assume the availability of an initial SoC input model with explicit communication, whose quality significantly impacts the effectiveness of the communication exploration techniques. Today, these initial models need to be manually written by engineers, which is tedious, error-prone and time consuming. In fact, our studies on industrial-size examples have shown that about 50% of the communication exploration time is spent on coding and re-coding of the initial specification model. In this paper, we propose an efficient interactive approach to explicit communication creation by automating some of the common coding tasks in specification models for communication exploration. Our results show significant savings in designer time.","PeriodicalId":362373,"journal":{"name":"2007 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference","volume":"3 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"113971331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Parameter Reduction for Variability Analysis by Slice Inverse Regression (SIR) Method","authors":"A. Mitev, M. Marefat, D. Ma, Janet Roveda","doi":"10.1049/iet-cds:20070185","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1049/iet-cds:20070185","url":null,"abstract":"With semiconductor fabrication technologies scaled below 100 nm, the design-manufacturing interface becomes more and more complicated. The resultant process variability causes a number of issues in the new generation IC design. One of the biggest challenges is the enormous number of process variation related parameters. These parameters represent numerous local and global variations, and pose a heavy burden in today's chip verification and design. This paper proposes a new way of reducing the statistical variations (which include both process parameters and design variables) according to their impacts on the overall circuit performance. The new approach creates an effective reduction subspace (ERS) and provides a transformation matrix by using the mean and variance of the response surface. With the generated transformation matrix, the proposed method maps the original statistical variations to a smaller set of variables with which we process variability analysis. Thus, the computational cost due to the number of variations is greatly reduced. Experimental results show that by using new method we can achieve 20% to 50% parameter reduction with only less than 8% error on average.","PeriodicalId":362373,"journal":{"name":"2007 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114072663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reduced-Order Wide-Band Interconnect Model Realization using Filter-Based Spline Interpolation","authors":"A. Nieuwoudt, Mehboob Alam, Y. Massoud","doi":"10.1109/ASPDAC.2007.358014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ASPDAC.2007.358014","url":null,"abstract":"In the paper, we develop a systematic methodology for modeling sampled interconnect frequency response data based on spline interpolation. Through piecewise polynomial interpolation, we are able to avoid the numerical problems associated with global polynomial fitting and generate higher order systems to model simulated or measured wideband frequency response data. We reduce the complexity of the generated systems using a data point pruning algorithm and by applying model order reduction based on balanced truncation. The methodology provides substantially greater accuracy than global polynomial approximation while only having O(n) growth in model complexity.","PeriodicalId":362373,"journal":{"name":"2007 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121287416","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
T. Shiro, Masaaki Abe, K. Sakanushi, Y. Takeuchi, M. Imai
{"title":"A Processor Generation Method from Instruction Behavior Description Based on Specification of Pipeline Stages and Functional Units","authors":"T. Shiro, Masaaki Abe, K. Sakanushi, Y. Takeuchi, M. Imai","doi":"10.1109/ASPDAC.2007.358000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ASPDAC.2007.358000","url":null,"abstract":"This paper proposes a method for generating a pipeline processor from the behavior description of instructions. In the proposed method, a micro-operation description is generated by complementing the behavior description with specifications of the pipeline stages, such as the number of pipeline stages, the attributes of each stage. From the behavior description, software development tools, such as an instruction-set simulator (ISS), a compiler, and an assembler can be generated, and a synthesizable HDL description of a processor can be generated from the micro-operation description. Compared with the conventional method of writing individual descriptions, the proposed method can dramatically reduce the code size of the architectural description language and the design time without degrading the design quality. As a result, a design space exploration can be performed efficiently.","PeriodicalId":362373,"journal":{"name":"2007 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference","volume":"155 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116548042","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Overview on Low Power SoC Design Technology","authors":"K. Usami","doi":"10.1109/ASPDAC.2007.358057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ASPDAC.2007.358057","url":null,"abstract":"So far, low power design for SoC has mainly focused on techniques to reduce dynamic power and standby leakage power. In further scaled devices, design technology to reduce active leakage power at the operation mode becomes indispensable. This is because the share of leakage power in the total operation power continues to increase as the device gets scaled. This paper gives a brief overview on the conventional leakage reduction techniques and describes novel approaches to use run-time power gating for active leakage reduction.","PeriodicalId":362373,"journal":{"name":"2007 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123621988","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}