Bridging the gap: An Optimization-based Framework for Fast, Simultaneous Circuit & System Design Space Exploration
Year: 2008
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Design of modern mixed signal integrated circuits is becoming increasingly difficult.Continued MOSFET scaling is approaching the global power dissipation limits while increasing transistor variability, thus requiring careful allocation of power and area resources to achieve increasingly more aggressive performance specifications.In this tightly constrained environment traditional iterative system-to-circuit redesign loop, is becoming inefficient.With complex system architectures and circuit specifications approaching technological limits of the process employed, the designers have less room to margin for the overhead of strict system and circuit design interdependencies.Severely constrained modern mixed IC design can take many iterations to converge in such a design flow.This is an expensive and' time consuming process.The situation is particularly acute in high-speed links.As an important building block of many systems (high speed I/O, on-chip communication, ... ) power efficiency and area footprint are of utmost importance.Design of these systems is challenging in both system and circuit domain.On one hand system architectures are becoming increasingly complex to provide necessary performance increase.On the other, circuit implementation of these increasingly complicated systems is difficult to achieve under tight power and area budget.To bridge this gap between system and circuit design, we formulate a circuit-tosystem optimization-driven framework.It is an equation-based description, powered by a human designer.Provided with equation-based model we use fast optimization tools to quickly scout the available design space.Presence of a designer in the flow is invaluable resource enabling significant saving by simplifying the models to capture only the relevant information and constraining the search space to areas where meaningful solutions might be expected to be found.Thus, the computational effort overhead that plagues the simulation-based design space exploration and design optimization is greatly reduced.The flow is powered by a signomial optimization engine.The key challenge is 0018
Author: Ranko Sredojević
Language: English
Subfield: Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1491528184