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

This book carefully details design tools and techniques for high-performance ASIC design. Using these techniques, the performance of ASIC designs can be improved by two to three times.

Important topics include:

• Improving performance through microarchitecture;
• Timing-driven floorplanning;
• Controlling and exploiting clock skew;
• High performance latch-based design in an ASIC methodology;
• Automatically identifying and synthesizing complex logic gates;
• Automated cell sizing to increase performance and reduce power;
• Controlling process variation.

These techniques are illustrated by designs running two to three times the speed of typical ASICs in the same process generation.