Whenever developers choose among alternative technical approaches, they make a design decision. Collectively, design decisions shape how software implements its requirements and shape non-functional quality attributes such as maintainability, ...

Detailed routing is one of the most complex and time-consuming stages of VLSI design process. Due to the rapidly growing problem scale and increasing number of design rules in advanced technology nodes, a feasible routing result can only be achieved ...

In this paper, we will first have a brief review of the ISPD 2018 and 2019 Initial Detailed Routing Contests. We will then visit a few important and interesting topics in VLSI routing that includes GPU accelerated routing, signal speed optimization in ...

We propose a fast interposer bus router that observes the complex design rules of silicon interposer layers and optimizes the signal integrity. By escaping highly integrated physical layers (PHYs) of chiplets and sharing the same bus topology, our router ...

Good documentation offers the promise of enabling developers to easily understand design decisions. Unfortunately, in practice, design documents are often rarely updated, becoming inaccurate, incomplete, and untrustworthy. A better solution is to enable ...

Detailed routing is one of the most time-consuming steps of physical synthesis of integrated circuits. Also, it is very challenging due to the complexity of the design rules that the router must obey. In this article, we present SmartDR, a detailed ...

In this paper, we present an algorithm of transistor placement that takes unroutable standard cells and makes them routable by moving transistors in local windows. It converts the task of placement of gridded FinFETs into a Boolean problem and employs ...

This paper reports an experience feedback on the design of several interactive board games distributed over several devices, a design driven by the 5W1H questions. The analysis of the games developed in reference to the theory of tabletop territoriality ...

In advanced technology nodes, detailed routing becomes the most complicated and runtime consuming stage. To spur detailed routing research, ISPD 2018 initial detailed routing contest is hosted and it is the first ISPD contest on detailed routing ...

This work discusses the ASAP7 predictive process design kit (PDK) and associated standard cell library. The necessity for multi-patterning (MP) techniques at advanced nodes results in the standard cell and SRAM architecture becoming entangled with ...

This paper reviews the industry practice of using the design rule manual (DRM) for documenting semiconductor manufacturing limitations and how these are translated to design rule check (DRC) decks. The fundamental flaws in the current paradigm are shown ...

This paper discusses design rules and layout guidelines for an open source predictive process design kit (PDK) for multi-gate 15nm FinFET devices. Additional design rules are introduced considering process variability, and challenges involved in ...

As software systems are maintained, their architecture often de-grades through the processes of architectural drift and erosion. These processes are often intertwined and the same modules in the code become the locus of both drift and erosion symptoms. ...

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a popular technique for modularizing crosscutting concerns. However, constructs aimed at supporting crosscutting modularity may break class modularity. For example, to understand a method call may require a whole-...

Short-interfering RNAs (siRNAs) suppress gene expression through a process called RNA interference (RNAi). Current research focuses on finding design principles or rules for siRNAs and using them to artificially generate siRNAs with high efficiency of ...

Moore's law requires the shrinking of physical dimensions of the transistors to roughly half their area every two years. This poses a tremendous challenge on how to print and manufacture these ever-shrinking physical components that make up the ...

This paper describes the application of Exact Kinematic Constraint Design to designs meant for tangible interaction with users. The paper gives rules for generating high quality mechanical designs for tangible interactions. Each rule is explained using ...

The emergence of aspect-oriented programming (AOP) languages has provided software designers with new mechanisms and strategies for decomposing programs into modules and composing modules into systems. What we do not yet fully understand is how best to ...

This paper presents a literature review on enterprise architecture principles. The results show that there are various gaps in the research literature: No accepted definition of enterprise architecture principles has emerged yet. A detailed conceptual ...

The external specifications of an IC (functions, clock rate, power consumption, etc.) determine the competitiveness of a product. To be successful and profitable in the IC business, designers need to "out-design" their competitors. Usually, Design-For-...