EDA for extreme scale systems: design abstractions, metrics, and benchmarks

The context for EDA research is rapidly changing thanks to enhanced and novel switching devices, manufacturing technologies, new application targets, and the increasing soft- ware development effort required for new ICs. These trends continue to expand the gap between the capabilities of systems and what can be utilized by designers. To address these problems requires a collaborative effort with indus- try researchers, academics, and funding agencies working together in close partnership. This talk describes recommendations from the recent CCC workshop series on EDA in the Extreme Scale era for improving the collaboration between IC designers and EDA. There remains a continued importance of effective design abstractions that facilitate research on EDA advances that can be effectively translated to actual design flows for relevant technologies. Further, these abstractions must be accompanied by (i) effective design metrics, especially for new technologies where optimization objectives may not be obvious, and (ii) appropriate benchmarks, especially for more established technologies where alternative optimization techniques must be carefully compared. Focus on these research directions for EDA will have direct impact to reduce the existing capabilities gap between tools and designers.