Modern VLSI Design: System-on-Chip Design, Third Edition

6Subsystem Design

Highlights:

Pipelines and data paths.

Adders.

Multipliers.

Memory.

PLAs.

6.1 Introduction

Most chips are built from a collection of subsystems: adders, register files, state machines, etc. Of course, to do a good job of designing a chip, we must be able to properly design each of the major components. Studying individual subsystems is also a useful prelude to the study of complete chips because a single component is a focused design problem. When designing a complete chip, such as the HP 7200 CPU shown in Figure 6-1, we often have to perform several different types of computation, each with different cost constraints. A single component, on the other hand, performs a single task; as a result, the design choices ...