Plenary Session II

8:30am-10:15am

Co-Chairs

Kaustav Banerjee, ISQED Conference Vice Chair

Kris Verma, ISQED Plenary Chair  

8:30am

Welcome and Introduction

8:45am-9:15am

2P.1 Addressing the IC Designer’s Needs: Integrated Design Software for Faster, More Economical Chip Design  

Rajeev Madhavan

Chairman & CEO, Magma Design Automation  

Electronic design automation continues to attract a great deal of investment from the venture community, fostering the creation of startup companies focused on developing unique point-tool solutions. While many innovative new technologies come from this, industry must consider the increasingly critical need of ic designers and manufacturers: integrated design flows that enable the design and production of chips with fewer resources and in less time, without compromising the quality of results. Increasingly evident is the advantage of integrated design and the economies it brings while delivering the same quality of results as point-tool-based approaches.  The future of eda depends on the industry’s ability to deliver solutions that enable the ic industry’s integration of electronic design tools and processes as it relies on eda to provide the means for producing the next generation of semiconductor products.

9:15am - 9:45am

2P.2    Closing the Gap Between ASIC and Full Custom: A Path to Quality Design  

Michael Reinhardt

President & CEO, RubiCad Corporation

Although process technology has shrunk down to nanometer features over the last decade, the gap between ASIC design and full-custom ic design has widened. This gap includes significant differences in performance, price, and profit between the two design styles. It is also revealed by huge differences in quality between the two styles in speed, power distribution and consumption, yield, and reliability, in some cases as much as an order of magnitude. To fully utilize the latest process technologies, a full-custom design approach with the productivity of an ASIC flow is necessary.

Michael Reinhardt will start with an analysis of how the gap between ASIC and full-custom design began, and discuss its long-term consequences on the whole industry. He will then show the positive effects on the quality of IC design, and on the chip industry’s economic situation, which can occur if this gap can be closed. He will illustrate possible strategies and solutions for achieving this closure, and how they can be implemented right now in practical ways.

9:45am - 10:15am

2P.3   A VLSI System Perspective for  Microprocessors Beyond 90nm

Shekhar Borkar

Fellow & Director of Circuit Research lab, Intel Corporation

Microprocessor performance increased by five orders of magnitude in the last three decades. This was made possible by continued technology scaling, improving transistor performance to increase frequency, increasing integration capacity to realize complex architectures, and reducing energy consumed per logic operation to keep power dissipation within limit. The technology treadmill will continue to fulfill the microprocessor performance demand; however, with some adverse effects posing barriers—limited by power delivery and dissipation—and not by manufacturing or cost. Therefore, performance at any cost will not be an option; significant improvements in efficiency of transistor utilization will be necessary. This talk will discuss potential solutions in all disciplines, such as microarchitecture, circuits, design technologies & methodologies, thermals, and power delivery, to overcome these barriers for microprocessors beyond 90nm.