Integrated Circuit Module Generation

Norman Walker,  M.S 1999, advisor: Bob Brodersen

Current fabrication, design techniques, and technology is allowing for the mainstreaming of system-on-a-chip designs. Combination of heterogeneous systems such as analog, dedicated logic, microprocessor cores, and digital signal processing cores requires an increased focus on the engineering of these integrated systems because of the added complexity. Evolving the design flow will also allow for the expanded potential to investigate a larger design space or set of possible designs with minimal effort. This in turn will lead to smaller time to fabrication for designs, and therefore more time to explore the abstracted architecture variations. System-on-a-chip design being a crucial research component of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC), tremendous focus has been brought to a design flow that meshes well with heterogeneous, wireless design.