New Tradeoffs In Leading-Edge Chip Design

By Katherine Derbyshire, Semiconductor Engineering (November 21st, 2024)

Device design begins with the anticipated workload. What is it actually supposed to do? What resources — computational units, memory, sensors — are available?

Answering these questions and developing the functional architecture are the first steps in a new design — well before committing it to silicon, said Tim Kogel, senior director of technical product management at Synopsys. Yet even these early decisions begin to constrain the physical architecture.

With a model of the proposed functionality, planners can begin to ask ‘what if’ questions. Does increasing on-chip memory improve performance enough to justify the increased cost and silicon area? What type of GPU is the best match for the anticipated workload?

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