Simpler, more efficient design

Design of custom integrated circuits has become prohibitively expensive for many application domains. As a result, these domains often choose to implement the desired functionality on programmable platforms, but those solutions are less energy efficient. This paper proposes several approaches for making the design process more efficient and enabling custom energy-efficient integrated circuits. Function generators, as opposed to function instances, should be designed, which combined with higher-level design abstraction improve design efficiency and foster reuse. The use of generators also enables modular designs, aiding design verification. Rapid design flow maps generated modules into silicon and enables design-space exploration for optimal efficiency. Open-source repository of function generators and their mappings into systems allow designers to selectively add value to the design. These principles are demonstrated on a design of a processor, based on an open-source instruction set architecture, with integrated switched-capacitor DC-DC converters implemented in 28nm FDSOI. The chip is designed with a relatively small team and features high conversion efficiency (80-86%) and high energy efficiency (26.2 DP GFLOPS/W).