SYSTEMATIC, NORMALIZED METRIC FOR ANALYZING AND COMPARING OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUES FOR INTEGRATED CIRCUITS EMPLOYING VOLTAGE SCALING AND INTEGRATED CIRCUITS DESIGNED THEREBY
First Claim
1. A method of designing an integrated circuit, comprising:
- generating a functional integrated circuit design;
determining a target clock rate for said functional integrated circuit design;
generating a netlist from said functional integrated circuit design that meets said target clock rate;
determining a unitless performance/power quantifier from said netlist;
attempting to increase said unitless performance/power quantifier by changing at least one of a speed, an area and a power consumption in at least some noncritical paths in said netlist, wherein said attempting is performed by a processor; and
generating a layout of said integrated circuit from said netlist.
7 Assignments
0 Petitions
Accused Products
Abstract
Various embodiments of methods of designing an integrated circuit (IC) are provided herein. One embodiment of one such method includes: (1) generating a functional IC design, (2) determining a target clock rate for the functional IC design, (3) generating a netlist from the functional IC design that meets the target clock rate, (4) determining a unitless performance/power quantifier from the netlist, (5) attempting to increase the unitless performance/power quantifier by changing at least one of a speed, an area and a power consumption in at least some noncritical paths in the netlist, wherein the attempting is performed by a processor and (6) generating a layout of the IC from the netlist.
-
Citations
15 Claims
-
1. A method of designing an integrated circuit, comprising:
-
generating a functional integrated circuit design; determining a target clock rate for said functional integrated circuit design; generating a netlist from said functional integrated circuit design that meets said target clock rate; determining a unitless performance/power quantifier from said netlist; attempting to increase said unitless performance/power quantifier by changing at least one of a speed, an area and a power consumption in at least some noncritical paths in said netlist, wherein said attempting is performed by a processor; and generating a layout of said integrated circuit from said netlist. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)
-
-
9. A method of designing an integrated circuit, comprising:
-
generating a functional integrated circuit design; determining a target clock rate for said functional integrated circuit design; determining a target area for said functional integrated circuit design; determining a target power consumption for said functional integrated circuit design; determining whether said integrated circuit is to employ voltage scaling or adaptive voltage scaling; generating a netlist from said functional integrated circuit design that meets said target clock rate; determining a unitless performance/power quantifier from said netlist; attempting to increase said unitless performance/power quantifier by changing all of said speed, said area and said power consumption in said at least some noncritical paths in said netlist, wherein said attempting is performed by a processor; and generating a layout of said integrated circuit from said netlist. - View Dependent Claims (10, 11, 12)
-
-
13. A method of designing an integrated circuit, comprising:
-
calculating a unitless performance/power quantifier for said integrated circuit, wherein the calculating is performed by a processor; and employing said unitless performance/power quantifier to characterize said integrated circuit relative to other integrated circuits. - View Dependent Claims (14, 15)
-
Specification