Synchoros VLSI Design Style
Time: Fri 2022-05-27 13.00
Location: Ka-Sal C (Sven-Olof Öhrvik), Kistagången 16, Kista
Video link: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/66321917120
Language: English
Subject area: Electrical Engineering
Doctoral student: Dimitrios Stathis , Elektronik och inbyggda system
Opponent: Professor Dimitrios Soudris, National Technical University of Athens, School of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Department of Computer Science
Supervisor: Professor Ahmed Hemani, Elektronik och inbyggda system; Professor Anders Lansner, Beräkningsvetenskap och beräkningsteknik (CST); Dr.-Ing. Christian Weis, MSD R Group, TU Kaiserslautern
QC 20220506
Abstract
Computers have become essential to everyday life as much as electricity, communications and transport. That is evident from the amount of electricity we spend to power our computing systems. According to some reports it is estimated to be ≈ 7% of the total consumption worldwide. This trend is very worrisome, and the development of computing systems with lower power consumption is essential. This is even more important for battery-powered computers deployed in the field. The industry and the scientific community have realised that general-purpose computing platforms cannot offer that level of computational efficiency and that customisation is the solution to this problem. Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) provide the highest efficiency in the mainstream implementation styles. ASICs have been shown to provide 100 to 1000× better computational efficiency than general-purpose computing platforms. However, the design cost of ASICs restricts it to products that have a large volume or large profit. In essence, to achieve ASIC-like computational efficiency, the design efficiency becomes the bottleneck. SynchorosVLSI design has been proposed to non-incrementally lower the design cost of custom ASIC-like solutions. The synchoros VLSI design is a novel concept that can reduce the design cost of ASICs and their manufacturing. Insynchoros design, the space is discretised, and the final design emerges by the abutment of synchoros micro-architecture level design objects called SiLago(Silicon Lego) blocks. The SiLago framework has the potential to reduce the design cost of ASICs and their manufacturing. This thesis makes three research areas of contributions toward synchoros VLSI design. The first area concerns composition by abutment. In this contribution, a design has been proposed to show how a clock tree can be created by abutting fragments inside the SiLago blocks. Additionally, the clock tree created by abutment was validated by the EDA tools and its cost metrics compared to the functionally equivalent clock tree created by the conventional EDA flows. The second area is to enhance the micro-architectural framework. These contributions include SiLago blocks tailored for neural network computation and architectural enhancements to improve the efficiency of executing streaming applications in the SiLago framework. Furthermore, a novel genome recognition application based on a self-organising map (SOM) was also mapped to the SiLago framework. The third area of contribution is implementing a model of cortex as a tiled ASIC design using custom 3D DRAM vaults for synaptic storage. This work is preparatory work to identify the SiLago blocks needed to support the implementation of spiking neuromorphic structures and in general applications of ordinary differential equations.