Customer Reviews

Closing the Gap Between ASIC & Custom: Tools and Techniques for High-Performance ASIC Design

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Whether trying to maximize the speed of a standard cell ASIC processor design or minimize the design time of a full custom processor this book describes, in detail, the considerations involved. The authors draw on real-world designs and extensively review several in particular. The book describes the impact on resulting processor performance of pipeline depth, clock tree design, register and latch choice, setup and clock-to-q times, slack passing, dynamic logic, logic design style, richness of standard cell library, wire and transistor sizing, floorplanning and other layout concerns, and the exploitation of process variation.

This book focuses strictly on processor circuit design and does not discuss software design, instruction set architecture, or die size and power issues.

This is a very useful book to help focus on how to develop high performance designs. It is a little dated on the technologies covered but gets the job done. One thing to remember is that microprocessor development methods usually will become ASIC development methods after a number of years and related EDA tool development.