Getting to the bottom of deep submicron
Proceedings of the 1998 IEEE/ACM international conference on Computer-aided design
Closing the gap between ASIC and custom: an ASIC perspective
Proceedings of the 37th Annual Design Automation Conference
The iCOREtm 520 MHz synthesizable CPU core
Proceedings of the 39th annual Design Automation Conference
A Domain-Specific Cell Based ASIC Design Methodology for Digital Signal Processing Applications
Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe - Volume 3
Timing optimization by replacing flip-flops to latches
Proceedings of the 2004 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference
Model-Based Exploration of the Design Space for Heterogeneous Systems on Chip
Journal of VLSI Signal Processing Systems
HLS-l: a high-level synthesis framework for latch-based architectures
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
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Typically, good automated ASIC designs may be two to five times slower than handcrafted custom designs. At last year's DAC this was examined and causes of the speed gap between custom circuits and ASICs were identified. In particular, faster custom speeds are achieved by a combination of factors: good architecture with well-balanced pipelines; compact logic design; timing overhead minimization; careful floorplanning, partitioning and placement; dynamic logic; post-layout transistor and wire sizing; and speed binning of chips. Closing the speed gap requires improving these same factors in ASICs, as far as possible. In this paper we examine a practical example of how these factors may be improved in ASICs. In particular we show how techniques commonly found in custom design were applied to design a high-speed 550 MHz disk drive read channel in an ASIC design flow.