Flexible ASIC: shared masking for multiple media processors

J.L. Wong, F. Kourshanfar, M. Potkonjak
2005 Proceedings. 42nd Design Automation Conference, 2005.  
ASIC provides mare than an order of magnitude advantage in terms of density, speed, and power requirement per gate. However, economic (cost of masks) and technological (deep micron manufacturability) trends favor FPGA as an imp]+ mentation platform. In order to combine the advantages of both platforms and alfeviate their disadvantages, recently a number of approaches, such as structured ASIC/regular fabrics, have been proposed. Our goal is to introduce an approach that has the same objective,
more » ... t is orthogonal t o those already proposed. The idea is to implement several ASIC designs in such a way that they share the datapath, memory structure, and several bottom layers of interconnect, while each design has only a few unique metal layers. We identified and addressed two main problems in our quest t o develop a CAD flow for realization of such designs. They are: (i) the creation of the datapath, and (ii) the identification of common and unique interconnects for each design. Both problems are solved optimally using ILP formulations. We assembled a design flow platfortn using two new prcgrams and the Trimaran and Shade tools. We quantitativdy analyzed the advantages and disadvantages of the approach using the Mediabench benchmark suite.
doi:10.1109/dac.2005.193945 fatcat:czfosqx4b5cplk3qzdurlenvba