Slides for Richard - FCRP Review, Washington DC

1
Calibrating Achievable Design Roundtable
Discussion June 9, 2002
Wayne Dai, Andrew Kahng, Tsu-Jae King, Wojciech
Maly, Igor Markov, Herman Schmit, Dennis Sylvester
Facilitator Bill Joyner, IBM/SRC
2
Attendees

• Faculty
• Herman Schmit, Wojciech Maly, Igor Markov, Dennis
  Sylvester, Andrew Kahng
• Students
• Michael Wang, Shuo Zhou, Bao Liu,, Stefanus
  Mantik, Yu Chen, Mike Oliver
• Industry
• Bill Joyner, Takahide Inoue, Simon Thomas, James
  Duley
• Other Industry feedback
• Sani Nassif

3
Discussion

• Whats the big problem?
• Cost tradeoffs need to be understood and modeled!
• Comments 5 cents / mm2 cost with 90nm
  technology and 300mm wafers. Reference fab may
  be constructed and available possibly available
  to GSRC?
• Variability
• What variability is tolerable? (This may be a
  sub-text to cost.)
• Technology utilization
• E.g., How to best use 100nm
• Comment we need a utilization vision, not just
  a technology vision (power? pin-limited?)
• Sharing of information (across industry, across
  academia, across industry-academia)
• E.g., shortage of qualified (analog) designers,
  and the issue of VLSI design education
• Comment Sometimes design is limited by design
  talent, but the product still gets out (available
  talent is applied as best it can)
• Is the solution education? (Re-education of old
  analog designers, education of digital designers
  in analog issues)

4
Discussion

• Whats being done well?
• Knowledge management for CAD and other concepts
• Seeding and promoting ideas (collaboration,
  metrics, open-source) for the participants and
  within the GSRC and other centers
• Motivating and justifying research directions for
  the other themes.
• What could be improved?
• Improved avenues for sharing data (esp. fab data)
  in addition to algorithms
• Pushing others to use and adopt the Bookshelf
• Become THE source of benchmark design examples
  and algorithm data
• Explore and identify the future applications that
  will drive silicon consumption