Amdahl’s figure of merit, SiGe HBT BiCMOS, and 3D chip stacking

Author

Jacobs, Phil ; Zia, Aamir ; Erdogan, Okan ; Belemjian, Paul ; Jin, Peng ; Kim, Jin Woo ; Chu, Mike ; Kraft, Russ ; McDonald, John F.

Author_Institution

Center for Integrated Electron., Rensselaer Polytech. Inst., Troy, NY

fYear

2007

fDate

7-10 Oct. 2007

Firstpage

202

Lastpage

207

Abstract

Forty years ago Gene Amdahl published a figure of merit for parallel computation, which proved extremely controversial. The controversy still rages today, although those that have looked closely at this figure of merit conclude that it is correct, but perhaps misinterpreted. In this paper we will look at a small variation on that law that suggests computer designers should take a closer look at two emerging technologies, SiGe HBT BiCMOS and 3D chip stacking. We may be overlooking a way to continue the clock race, and in so doing accomplish better parallelism.

Keywords

BiCMOS logic circuits; Ge-Si alloys; heterojunction bipolar transistors; integrated circuit design; logic design; microprocessor chips; 3D chip stacking; Amdahl figure of merit; SiGe; SiGe HBT BiCMOS; parallel computation; BiCMOS integrated circuits; Clocks; Concurrent computing; Equations; Germanium silicon alloys; Heterojunction bipolar transistors; Jacobian matrices; Parallel processing; Silicon germanium; Stacking;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Computer Design, 2007. ICCD 2007. 25th International Conference on

Conference_Location

Lake Tahoe, CA

ISSN

1063-6404

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-1257-0

Electronic_ISBN

1063-6404

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICCD.2007.4601901

Filename

4601901