A modular digital VLSI flow for high-productivity SoC design

Brucek Khailany, Evgeni Khmer, Rangharajan Venkatesan, Jason Clemons, Joel S. Emer, Matthew Fojtik, Alicia Klinefelter, Michael Pellauer, Nathaniel Ross Pinckney, Yakun Sophia Shao, Shreesha Srinath, Christopher Torng, Sam Likun Xi, Yanqing Zhang, Brian Zimmer

Abstract: A high-productivity digital VLSI flow for designing complex SoCs is presented. The flow includes high-level synthesis tools, an object-oriented library of synthesizable SystemC and C++ components, and a modular VLSI physical design approach based on fine-grained globally asynchronous locally synchronous (GALS) clocking. The flow was demonstrated on a 16nm FinFET testchip targeting machine learning and computer vision.