Getting Gigascale Chips: Challenges and Opportunities in Continuing Moore's Law

ABSTRACT

Processor performance has increased by five orders of magnitude in the last three decades, made possible by following Moore’s law—that is, continued technology scaling, improved transistor performance to increase frequency, additional (to avoid repetition) integration capacity to realize complex architectures, and reduced energy consumed per logic operation to keep power dissipation within limits. Advances in software technology, such as rich multimedia applications and runtime systems, exploited this performance explosion, delivering to end users higher productivity, seamless Internet connectivity, and even multimedia and entertainment.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.7 INTEGRATED CIRCUITS
      B.7.1 Types and Design Styles
          Subjects: Advanced technologies

Additional Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.7 INTEGRATED CIRCUITS
      B.7.1 Types and Design Styles
          Subjects: VLSI (very large scale integration)
      B.7.2 Design Aids
          Subjects: Simulation
  B.8 Performance and Reliability
      B.8.2 Performance Analysis and Design Aids

General Terms:
Design, Performance