Author: Ofer Shacham

Publisher: Stanford University

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13:

Recent changes in technology scaling have made power dissipation today's major performance limiter. As a result, designers struggle to meet performance requirements under stringent power budgets. At the same time, the traditional solution to power efficiency, application specific designs, has become prohibitively expensive due to increasing nonrecurring engineering (NRE) costs. Most concerning are the development costs for design, validation, and software for new systems. In this thesis, we argue that one can harness ideas of reconfigurable designs to build a design framework that can generate semi-custom chips --- a Chip Generator. A domain specific chip generator codifies the designer knowledge and design trade-offs into a template that can be used to create many different chips. Like reconfigurable designs, these systems fix the top level system architecture, amortizing software and validation and design costs, and enabling a rich system simulation environment for application developers. Meanwhile, below the top level, the developer can "program" the individual inner components of the architecture. Unlike reconfigurable chips, a generator "compiles" the program to create a customized chip. This compilation process occurs at elaboration time --- long before silicon is fabricated. The result is a framework that enables more customization of the generated chip at the architectural level, because additional components and logic can be added if the customization process requires it. At the same time this framework does not introduce inefficiency at the circuit level because unneeded circuit overheads are not taped out. Using Chip Generators, we argue, will enable design houses to design a wide family of chips using a cost structure similar to that of designing a single chip --- potentially saving tens of millions of dollars --- while enabling per-application customization and optimization.