Rice University
Department of Computer Science
and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
present

Ankur Srivastava
University of California, Los Angeles

New Paradigms in Design Automation

Abstract

The field of design automation has come a very long way in the last two decades. But, the current trends in manufacturing technology and market have put a question mark on traditional methodologies of design automation. This talk briefly covers the twenty years of CAD and discusses the latest trends and challenges that the research community needs to address.

Next, two new paradigms of VLSI-CAD are presented. The first address the issue of predictability in power estimation. There are certain designs that are more predictable than others. The basic question is WHY? We study the properties that make a design predictable and optimize for those properties. Of course there is a premium to pay, which is design quality. This cost, in many cases, is outweighed by the massive gains in predictability. The second design objective that we discuss is "SLACK". Through massive experimentation, we validate the claim that "SLACK" is the universal optimization objective. We then propose a design flow that optimizes slack and hence almost every other design objective.

Thursday, March 21 at 4:00p.m. in Duncan Hall 1064
A reception will precede the talk at 3:30p.m. in DH 3092

Ankur Srivastava is a faculty candidate.

About Ankur Srivastava

Ankur Srivastava is a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science department at UCLA. He received his Bachelor in Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and his Master of Science in Computer Engineering from Northwestern University. His main areas of interest include VLSI-CAD for mobile and low power embedded systems.