Getting the most out of your system - imec
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Getting the most out of your system

Connecting advanced technology options to system-level performance

Summary

As traditional semiconductor technology scaling slows down, co-optimizing both design and technology (DTCO) has proven an attractive way to further improve scaling benefits.  


The benefits as well as complexity increase however exponentially with every abstraction layer we traverse for the co-optimization. Today, this cross-layer co-optimization methodology is extended to include the highest abstraction layers: the system application domain – to perform what we call system-technology co-optimization (STCO). 


As the process of co-optimizing many knobs at many different abstraction layers is not a task that is manually feasible, a framework is proposed that enables easy, fast, detailed design space exploration. In this article, this framework – called SEAT – is explained and illustrated with examples from the memory landscape.