We are presently observing a paradigm change in designing complex SoC as
it occurs roughly every twelve years due to the exponentially increasing
number of transistors on a chip. This design discontinuity, as all
previous ones, is characterized by a move to a higher level of
abstraction. This is required to cope with the rapidly increasing design
costs. While the present paradigm change shares the move to a higher
level of abstraction with all previous ones, there exists also a key
difference. For the ?rst time shrinking geometries do not
leadtoacorrespondingincreaseofperformance. InarecenttalkLisaSuofIBM
pointed out that in 65nm technology only about 25% of performance
increase can be attributed to scaling geometries while the lion share is
due to innovative processor architecture [1]. We believe that this
fact will revolutionize the entire semiconductor industry. What is the
reason for the end of the traditional view of Moore's law? It is
instructive to look at the major drivers of the semiconductor industry:
wireless communications and multimedia. Both areas are characterized by
a rapidly
increasingdemandofcomputationalpowerinordertoprocessthesophisticated
algorithmsnecessarytooptimallyutilizethepreciousresourcebandwidth. The
computational power cannot be provided by traditional processor
architectures and shared bus type of interconnects. The simple reason
for this fact is energy ef?ciency: there exist orders of magnitude
between the energy ef?ciency of an algorithm implemented as a ?xed
functionality computational element and of a software implementation on
a processor.
