Significant?
Simplex, Toshiba Redesign
Pattern for Chip Circuitry
By MOLLY WILLIAMS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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Simplex Solutions Inc. and Toshiba Corp. have developed a new way of laying out circuits on a chip, which they believe will significantly cut manufacturing costs, improve performance and reduce power consumption.
The new technology, to be formally announced Monday, is made possible through software used to design the roadmap of circuits on a chip. Until now, chip circuitry has always been laid out using what's called "Manhattan routing," which means the wires run only on a grid of North-South or East-West. With the new design tools, chip designers can lay out the roadmap with diagonal routes as well.
Simplex, a Sunnyvale, Calif., maker of software used in chip design, said its new X Architecture means that each sliver of silicon could have fewer lines of circuitry. Some experts believe the technology could be as significant a breakthrough as the advent of copper interconnects, a change in chip-manufacturing technology a few years ago that has enabled chips to be much faster.
"Retroactively we'll see this as one of the most significant advances" for designing chips, said Kurt Keutzer, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley.
For example, if a designer needs to lay a circuit that goes from the lower-left corner of a chip to the upper-right corner, the engineer can now draw a diagonal route straight across the chip instead of going along the lower edge and then up the right side. That means it can take as much as 20% less wire in a processor, which would make the chip as much as 10% faster, use 20% less power and get 30% better yields, or usable chips on each wafer, Simplex said.
Chip designers create a map of the circuits on a processor and then use software to simulate how the processor will work. The increasing power of computers used to run simulations of how chips will work enabled Simplex to create a software program that can handle the use of diagonal interconnects.
Simplex and Toshiba worked together to make sure the software worked in designing processors and that it was possible to manufacture those chips with current equipment. Toshiba is the first licensee of Simplex's technology and will begin selling chips with the new architecture next year. Simplex expects to sign up other chip makers as licensees next year.
Several chip-equipment makers have also signed on to the architecture, including Applied Materials Inc., KLA-Tencor Corp. and DuPont Photomasks Inc., Simplex said. |
