POWER, INTERCONNECT AND COMPLEXITY CRISES IN FUTURE VLSI: FROM A DESIGNER'S POINT OF VIEW

The VLSI design productivity crisis, that is, the fact that the number of available transistors grows much faster than the ability to design them meaningfully, has become the greatest threat to the growth of semiconductor industry. The cost-performance is rapidly improved as devices are scaled down. This is the reason why the miniaturization has been pursued persistently for these thirty years and will be pursued in the future. As semiconductor geometries continue to shrink and the chips themselves become ever-more complex, the cost of research and development continues to skyrocket. Recently, however, unfavorable effects caused by the scaling have become eminent. First, the power density increases. Secondly, interconnect related quantities increase such as interconnect delay, current density, and noise. Lastly, since the number of devices on a chip increases, the design and test of VLSI’s become more difficult. There are certain key issues that serve as active areas of research and are constantly improving as the field continues to mature. In this paper, power crises, interconnection crises and complexity crises and their possible solutions are described together with the possible view of the future VLSI’s.