Managing Chip Design Complexity in the Domain-Specific SoC Era

Chip designers can no longer rely on Moore's Law and Dennard scaling to make inefficient general-purpose processors faster, cheaper, and lower-power. The industry has instead been forced toward building specialized domain-specific systems on chip (SoCs) to meet next-generation product requirements. Balancing the complexity of these specialized chips with the need to improve time to market is a great challenge of the domain-specific SoC era. We argue that reuse and rapid validation are key to bringing these specialized SoCs to market faster. In this paper, we share our observations of industrial and academic attempts to vault this hurdle, and describe how SiFive, in its early days, quickly designed the Freedom Unleashed 540 SoC with a small team and a tight budget.