- The average performance of products in your market segment triples every 36 months. Your design engineers have proposed an optimization that will increase performance by 12%. The optimization will postpone the completion date of the project by 2 months. Should the engineers implement the optimization and postpone the completion date, or should they stick to the original schedule?
- Your group designs a microprocessor for use in cell phones and palmtop computers. You currently fabricate your chips on a 0.25micron process. A new fabrication facility with a 0.13micron process has asked you if you would like to switch to their facility. What do you believe will be the three most important tradeoffs between remaining with the 0.25 micron fabrication process and switching to the 0.13 micron process?
- Explain derating factor
- The average performance in the market segment will increase by 6.3%. Design engineers will increase performance by 12%, which is more than the competition will increase in performance. So, the engineers should complete the optimization and postpone the completion date.
- The three points
- smaller feature size will likely increase leakage power
- smaller feature size will decrease area, thereby decreasing cost
- new facility may have manufacturing problems
- Derating factors give factors for predicting the maximum clock speed of a circuit as supply voltage, temperature, and other environmental factors change. In the formula below, F is the maximum clock speed and V is the supply voltage. As the supply voltage increases, the maximum clock speed also increases.
Difficulty: Medium
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