ISSCC panel says “yes… maybe” to 100-day hardware

A panel of experts gathered in San Francisco in February to ask, can 100 million transistors in a 100-square-millimeter die be designed in 100 days? And the answer was … maybe. The good news is that the notorious productivity gap is being closed by re-use and platform-based design, but only for digital and memory-intensive circuits, as industry is increasingly looking to integrate and re-use analog circuits. The gap exists between the slower growth in design productivity over manufacturing productivity, and analog circuits are proving resistant to design automation and still require — and get — much handcrafting. These were the observations of the panel of EDA and System-On-Chip experts gathered at International Solid-State Circuits Conference.