VLSI Modules Research Articles

A heuristic approach to analyzing VLSI modules

The complexity involved in VLSI creates the need to automate chip design as far as possible and to perform design decisions on a very high level. To support this task high-level CAD systems are needed. To ensure that the layouts produced by those systems meet a given specification, optimizations have to be performed. One of the problems to be solved in high-level optimization is that of performing operations without a clear knowledge of the real objective function. The absence of adequate information causes hard problems to become even harder to solve. Therefore we present some ideas to support VLSI chip design. This is done by providing predictions about the consequences of design decisions in early stages. In this paper we consider the problem of predicting the silicon area consumption of a module after placement and routing. These estimates are calculated by algorithms which perform a partial synthesis. Furthermore, formulas are deduced using characteristics of VLSI modules to estimate the routing area expenditures relative to a design system.

Personal Instrument (PI)—A PC-based signal processing system

The Personal Computer (PC) technology has seen an enormous growth in the last two years. Although increasingly viewed as a major productivity tool, the PC is likely to be limited for computation-intensive tasks such as telecommunications and improved human-factors I/O. At the same time, there has been another evolving technology—VLSI realization of general-purpose signal processor (SP) engines which are capable of boosting the performance levels of standard PCs by almost two orders of magnitude. With SPs in PCs, we now see tremendous opportunities for distributing computation-intensive tasks away from high-performance mainframe computers; previously formidable tasks such as speech coding and recognition, pattern and scene analysis, spectral analysis, high bit-rate communication, and the like are now all computable by utilizing a single VLSI module embedded in any standard personal computer. This combination of a general-purpose CPU and superfast real-time coprocessor is likely to be key to the future functions and success of advanced workstations. A signal processing subsystem with real-time data acquisition and control capabilities has been developed for the IBM PC at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory and is the topic of this paper.