The following 3 design styles are most popular in modern VLS

The following 3 design styles are most popular in modern VLSI design; FPGA design Standard cell based(SC) design and Full-custom (FC) design style. Please given your best choice for the following questions. a) Which design style will allow you the smallest chip size for a given technology? b) Which design style will results in the shortest design time? c) Which design style would you select if have to achieve the highest speed? d) Which design style would cost you the highest NRE (Non-recursive Engineering)? e) Which design style would be adopted to design the DRAMs used in your smartphone? f) If you have a limited budget but need to achieve a good performance with a small chip size which style would be your choice?

Solution

a)cell size is fixed in FPGA designing,fixed height in SC designing and FC designing has variable cell size.

b)fpga has fastest desiging time than FC and SC.SC has medium designing time and FC has lowest.

c)full custom have highest speed than comes standard cell design last fpga has lowest performance speed.

d)standard cell design has more non-recurring-engineering(NRE) cost because it takes more time for manfacturing.

e)All most FPGAs include blocks of RAM.So FPGA designing can be used for designing DRAM.

f)fpga can be used for design below few hundreds and if u want to use more than thousands than we have to use standard cell designing. So for small chip we can use FPGA designing.