Bridging the gap : an optimization-based framework for fast, simultaneous circuit & system design space exploration

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-to-system 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.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Sredojević, Ranko Radovin.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Vladimir Stojanović.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/43066

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/43066