Page 95 - A Practical Guide from Design Planning to Manufacturing

Chapter
3

Design Planning

Overview
This chapter presents an overview of the entire microprocessor design
flow and discusses design targets including processor roadmaps, design
time, and product cost.

Objectives
Upon completion of this chapter, the reader will be able to:

1. Explain the overall microprocessor design flow.
2. Understand the different processor market segments and their
requirements.
3. Describe the difference between lead designs, proliferations, and
compactions.
4. Describe how a single processor design can grow into a family of
products.
5. Understand the common job positions on a processor design team.
6. Calculate die cost, packaging cost, and overall processor cost.
7. Describe how die size and defect density impacts processor cost.

Introduction
Transistor scaling and growing transistor budgets have allowed micro-
processor performance to increase at a dramatic rate, but they have
also increased the effort of microprocessor design. As more functionality

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