UW/NW (University of Washington/Northwest) VLSI Consortium

摘要

One of the outstanding contributions during this reporting period has been our work in the energy complexity analysis of VLSI designs. An extensive theoretical analysis has been made of the energy requirements of several classes of functions, in particular transitive and one-switchable. A surprising result of this work is that, for systolic implementations of some of these functions, the average case energy consumption is of the same order as worst case. For this reason the energy optimization of many datapath systolic systems gives negligible returns. Another work in this area analyzes the speed and energy tradeoffs of dynamic and static PLA designs within various application domains. A major project of this reporting period has been the definition of a model for generator construction. The intent of the model is to provide a concise representation that captures the fundamental structural and functional properties of the circuit. With this representation a variety of output descriptions may be derived. During the past six months the model has been refined and a language parser written. Work is currently underway on the backend programs that analyze the model and produce schematics, layouts, and functional descriptions.