INVITED: A Modular Digital VLSI Flow for High-Productivity SoC Design

A high-productivity digital VLSI flow for designing complex SoCs is presented. The flow includes high-level synthesis tools, an object-oriented library of synthesizable SystemC and C++ components, and a modular VLSI physical design approach based on fine-grained globally asynchronous locally synchronous (GALS) clocking. The flow was demonstrated on a 16nm FinFET testchip targeting machine learning and computer vision.