From ASIC to ASIP: The Next Design Discontinuity

A variety of factors is making it increasingly difficult and expensive to design and manufacture traditional Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). This has started a significant move towards the use of programmable solutions of various forms – increasingly referred to as programmable platforms. For the platform manufacturer, programmability provides higher volume to amortize design and manufacturing costs, as the same platform can be used over multiple related applications, as well as over generations of an application. For the application implementer, programmability provides a lower risk and shorter time-to-market implementation path. The flexibility provided by programmability comes with a performance and power overhead. This can be significantly mitigated by using application specific platforms, also referred to as Application Specific Instruction Set Processors (ASIPs). This paper details the reasons for this significant change in application implementation philosop...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: ICCD
• Authors: Kurt Keutzer, Sharad Malik, A. Richard Newton
• Keywords: Application Specific Instruction, Application Specific Platforms, Hardware, ICCD 2002, Specific Integrated Circuits