Module Selection Using Manufacturing Information

Hiroyuki TOMIYAMA  Hiroto YASUURA  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences   Vol.E81-A   No.12   pp.2576-2584
Publication Date: 1998/12/25
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8508
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on VLSI Design and CAD Algorithms)
Category: High-level Synthesis
Keyword: 
high-level synthesis,  module selection,  manufacturability,  yield,  

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Summary: 
Since manufacturing processes inherently fluctuate, LSI chips which are produced from the same design have different propagation delays. However, the difference in delays caused by the process fluctuation has rarely been considered in most of existing high-level synthesis systems. This paper presents a new approach to module selection in high-level synthesis, which exploits the difference in functional unit delays. First, a module library model which assumes the probabilistic nature of functional unit delays is presented. Then, we propose a module selection problem and an algorithm which minimizes the cost per faultless chip. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm finds optimal module selections which would not have been explored without manufacturing information.