Limitations and challenges of computer-aided design technology for CMOS VLSI

As manufacturing technology moves toward fundamental limits of silicon CMOS processing, the ability to reap the full potential of available transistors and interconnect is increasingly important. Design technology (DT) is concerned with the automated or semi-automated conception, synthesis, verification, and eventual testing of microelectronic systems. While manufacturing technology faces fundamental limits inherent in physical laws or material properties, design technology faces fundamental limitations inherent in the computational intractability of design optimizations and in the broad and unknown range of potential applications within various design processes. In this paper, we explore limitations to how design technology can enable the implementation of single-chip microelectronic systems that take full advantage of manufacturing technology with respect to such criteria as layout density performance, and power dissipation.