Essential Electronic Design Automation (EDA)

Architecture, Methodology, and Design Flow

Nora:

What do designers mean when they speak of chip “architectures”?

IC Architectures

Andrea:	That is more jargon. There are many ways to implement an IC design. The designer chooses a specific physical IC architecture to implement the design (e.g., GA, SC, FPGA, or custom). Do you know about those?
Nora:	A little—someone at Sandbox said they were different ways to make an IC. He emphasized the time-to-market issue.
Andrea:	That's right. Here, let me sketch you a picture of some IC architectures. (See Figure 4.3.)
	Note the four different physical IC architectures. The block-based IC is usually a custom chip. The individual blocks may be custom logic, or memory blocks or microprocessors. The cells in the ...