Page 20 - A Practical Guide from Design Planning to Manufacturing

xviii Preface

designing power-efficient architectures or microarchitectures. How
should things like design validation, test, and packaging change to sup-
port power reduction? How should the design of the transistors them-
selves be altered? These questions are made more complex by a growing
need to focus not just on maximum power, but also on average power
across a variety of applications. Performance per watt is rapidly becom-
ing more important than simple performance, and our design methods
have only just begun to take this into account.
It is not for this book to say what the answers to these questions will
be. Instead, time will tell, but a future edition of this book will likely have
some of the answers as well as a whole list of new questions. In the
meantime, the methods described in this book are the foundation of
these future designs. With an understanding of the overall design flow,
the reader is ready to ask questions about today’s methods, and asking
questions is the first step toward finding answers.

Grant McFarland
February, 2006