Unit #0

Lecture 3

Design Challenges

CMOS VLSI Design: A Circuits and Systems Perspective, 4th Edition

by N. Weste and D. Harris, Addison-Wesley Computing (0321547748)
Digital Integrated Circuits: A Design Perspective, 2nd Edition
by J. Rabaey, A. Chandrakasan, and B. Nikolic, Prentice Hall (0130909963)
Highlight

 Key design metrics

‒ Area, performance, power, reliability, and cost
 Challenges and trends of VLSI design
‒ Power, reliability, cost
 Reading: Chapter 1.1

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Design Evolution

speed speed speed/power

/reliability
area/cost speed/power
reliable ultra-
power low power low power

1970’s 1980’s 1990’s 2000’s

3
Challenges in VLSI Design

“Microscopic Problems” “Macroscopic Issues”

 Ultra-high speed  Time-to-market
 Interconnect  Millions of gates
 Noise, crosstalk  High-level abstraction
 Clock distribution  Reuse & IP: portability
 Power dissipation  Predictability
 Manufacturability
 Reliability

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Power Dissipation
105 103
18KW
104 5KW 102 Switching
1.5KW
101

Power (W)
Power (Watts)

103 500W
Pentium® proc 100
102
10-1
486
10 8086 386
10-2
8080
1 4004 10-3
Leakage
0.1 10-4
1971 1974 1978 1985 1992 2000 2004 2008 10m 1m 100nm 10nm
Year Technology node

 Power delivery and dissipation will be prohibitive

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Even Worse: Power Density
10000
Rocket
Power Density (W/cm2)

1000 Nozzle
Nuclear
100 Reactor
Hot Plate
8086
10 P6
4004
8008 8085 386 Pentium
286 486
8080
1
1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Source: Intel
Year
 Power per (transistor switching) does go down with
technology scaling
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Design Innovation Demanded
14

Module Heat Flux (w/cm2)

IBM ES9000
12
Bipolar CMOS
10

8 Fujitsu VP2000
IBM 3090S IBM RY5
NTT
6 IBM RY7
Fujitsu M-780
Pulsar
4 IBM3090
CDC Cyber 205 IBM RY6
IBM4381
IBM3084 IBM RY4
2 IBM370 Fujitsu
Apache
IBM360 IBM3033 M380 Pentium II
0
1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Year of Announcement

 Technology used to be the answer for this trouble;

but, no candidate around the corner
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Reliability

 Process variations
 Dynamic uncertainties:
‒ Temperature
‒ Power supply (Ldi/dt noise)
‒ Crosstalk
‒ Soft error

 All degrade your yield

and waste resource

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Cost of Integrated Circuits

 NRE (non-recurrent engineering), i.e., fixed costs

‒ Design time and effort
‒ Mask generation
‒ Design verification
 Recurrent costs, i.e., Proportional cost
‒ Silicon processing (proportional to chip area)
‒ Packaging (proportional to volume)
‒ Test (proportional to volume)

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NRE Cost

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Recurrent Cost
Cost per M Gates
(IBS, 2014)

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Design Trend I: Integration

 Integrate various technologies; integral design solutions

Small Power
Signal RF RF

Power
Management

Analog
Baseband

Digital Baseband
(DSP + MCU)

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Design Trend II: Parallelism

 Concurrency for
better reliability,
programmability, and
cost factor
 Examples:
‒ Multiple cores
‒ Array structure

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Summary

 Digital ICs have come a long way and still

have quite some potential left for the coming
decades:
‒ Computation and Communications
‒ Automobile (30-70 chips/car now)
‒ Consumer electronics
‒ Energy conservation
‒ Security and intelligence
‒ Biomedical
‒ Much more with your innovation

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Quiz 3

 Why does power dissipation go up with scaling?

(a) Higher transistor density (b) Faster switching
(c) More transistors per chip (d) All of the above

Answer
 (d) All of the above

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