Virtual design for technology exploration - a process design integration methodology for a fabless entity -

The challenges of deriving early-adopter competitive advantage, even with fabless access to process technology, through leveraging features offered by the advanced, and possibly disruptive, process technologies in real SoC products, are outlined. A structured methodology for addressing these challenges, and bridging the gap between process and design, sufficiently early in the development cycle to allow co-optimization all the way up to the architecture level, is proposed. A virtual design flow of a potential product that allows rapid estimation of performance, power and cost attributes, as a function of a given set of process or design assumptions is proposed. Key features of such a virtual flow, and a summary of the attributes of several candidate point tools is presented. The accuracy requirements of the dasiapredictivepsila models required to enable this flow are assessed and discussed. A few example applications of the proposed methodology are presented to illustrate the use model, to define the required attributes of the virtual design flow, and to contrast this concept versus use of spreadsheets on one hand, or use of traditional design flows on the other.