Digital logic is the largest segment of the semiconductor market today. The implementation of digital logic is currently dominated by automated logic synthesis and physical design methodologies. These techniques allow digital designs to be completed in less time and with fewer designers than custom design techniques, which is now limited only to microprocessors and a small group of very high performance digital designs. While it is possible to imitate many of the high performance digital design techniques in custom designs using an ASIC design methodology, standard ASIC design flows do not support the use of domino logic.
The ability to easily use domino logic allows it to be selectively applied in a much larger application space. For example, as VLSI systems increasingly become systems on a chip, many traditional system level optimizations will be made on a chip. If a faster synthesizable domino logic processor core can replace several slower cores, this leads to a cost reduction. Alternately, if a legacy design needs to be made to run faster it can be done so by implementing it with domino logic without incurring the cost of re-designing the microarchitecture and porting the software. Another application of high speed digital logic is in scaled CMOS mixed signal applications where it can be used to control analog and radio frequency (RF) circuitry. The judicious use of domino logic in critical blocks minimizes the power overhead in its use, while maximizing the performance of any process technology.
"High speed digital logic is critically important for radio frequency (RF) application designed in advanced CMOS processes as this part of the wireless modem is increasingly relying on digital signal processing," said Thierry Arnaud, Director of RF Design at ST-NXP Wireless. "Automated design techniques provides for improved productivity, time to market, and overall design quality."
High Performance ASIC Design: Using Synthesizable Domino Logic in An ASIC Flow, published by
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