Custom is from Venus and synthesis from Mars

Due to ever increasing cost of doing design, design productivity and more specifically, cost of design has become a major bottleneck in large scale design projects. Due to the cost crunch, automated synthesis techniques have been gaining ground on manual and cost intensive (although potentially yielding higher quality of results) custom techniques. The push towards system level performance with multiple lower performance cores as opposed to single high performance core is also making the pursuit of frequency at any cost meaningless. Synthesis vs custom has traditionally been a lively debate in microprocessor companies but now it is becoming more widespread with the desire of fabless companies to more fully utilize the technology node in order to compete with IDMs by utilizing more custom techniques. Custom hotshots argue that we cannot afford to leave performance or power on table when you are spending 3billion $s in fabs. Industry needs to get maximum benefits possible. Synthesis fanatics will argue that designers should get over the last few ps and last few nW, as time to market, cost, and system performance are the new drivers and synthesis can not only meet the challenge but beat it many times with lower power solutions. This panel will present this internal debate in a public forum.