Rethinking Digital Design: Why Design Must Change

Author

Shacham, O. ; Azizi, O. ; Wachs, Matthias ; Qadeer, W. ; Asgar, Z. ; Kelley, K. ; Stevenson, John P ; Richardson, S. ; Horowitz, Mark ; Lee, Bang-Wook ; Solomatnikov, Alex ; Firoozshahian, A.

Author_Institution

Stanford Univ., Stanford, CA, USA

Volume

30

Issue

6

fYear

2010

Firstpage

9

Lastpage

24

Abstract

Because of technology scaling, power dissipation is today´s major performance limiter. Moreover, the traditional way to achieve power efficiency, application-specific designs, is prohibitively expensive. These power and cost issues necessitate rethinking digital design. To reduce design costs, we need to stop building chip instances, and start making chip generators instead. Domain-specific chip generators are templates that codify designer knowledge and design trade-offs to create different application-optimized chips.

Keywords

cooling; digital circuits; network synthesis; application-optimized chips; designer knowledge; domain-specific chip generators; power dissipation; power efficiency; rethinking digital design; Clocks; Computer architecture; Generators; Hardware; IEEE members; Logic gates; Software; ASIC; CMOS; Dennard scaling; H.264; Moore´s Law; RTL verification; chip generator; chip multiprocessor; design methodology; hardware generation; hardware optimization; power efficiency; system on chip;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Micro, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0272-1732

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/MM.2010.81

Filename

5567087