Once upon a time, integrated circuits (ICs) were built by the same companies that designed them. The design of an IC was tightly integrated with the manufacturing processes available within each ...

3D-ICs are proving a challenge even for designers accustomed to dealing with power and performance tradeoffs, but they are considered an inevitable migration path for leading-edge designs due to the ...

Detailed and precise hierarchical design planning is essential to achieving closure on large designs. In this article we describe a new hierarchical design flow and its usage on a 3 million-gate chip.