Challenges in Evaluations for a Typical-Case Design Methodology

Yuji Kunitake1,  Akihiro Chiyonobu1,  Koichiro Tanaka1,  Toshinori Sato2
1Kyushu Institute of Technology, 2Kyushu University


Abstract

According to the current trend of increasing variations in process technologies and thus in performance, the conservative worst-case design will not work since design margins can not be provided. We are investigating a typical-case design methodology, where designers focus on typical cases rather than on rarely-occurring worst cases. On evaluating the typical-case design, accurate circuit delay has to be considered, which is ignored in the current architectural-level simulations. While gate-level simulations consider circuit delay, they require huge amount of simulation time and hence are inappropriate for system designs, where designers examine a wide variety of design choices. In this paper, we show the challenges in evaluating designs that are based on the typical-case design methodology, and build a prototype architectural-level simulator, which can estimate circuit delay within tolerable simulation time.