Starting from the VSLI medium (a uniform substrate of about one million transistors and 100 meters of aluminum wire per cm2), three abstractions are developed: production rules, handshake circuits and the VLSI-language Tangram. Tangram was developed by Philips Research Lab. based on Hoare's communicating sequential processes. A so-called silicon compiler makes it possible to translate a Tangram program transparently into a handshake circuit and subsequently into an asynchronous circuit, expressed using production rules. IC area, speed, energy dissipation and testability can be analysed interactively. Looking at these quantities and looking at trade-offs is characteristic for VLSI programming.
After this introduction, VLSI-programming is practiced in the second half of the term. First there is a introduction into the toolset followed by a thorough analysis of a subset of the DLX (a MIPS-alike RISC processor, see Hennessey & Patterson]). Assignments focus on extending the initial version, making it cheaper through resource sharing, speeding it up through pipelining, making it more power efficient and on testing. Final examination is through a report followed by a discussion with the instructors. A precondition for entering the practical work is that a few small exercises have been done. The total amount of work comprises 4 ects
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