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VLSI Research

Develops high-speed circuit technologies and design methods that enable novel architectures.

Project Details

VLSI Research

Develops high-speed circuit technologies and design methods that enable novel architectures.

Project Overview

We develop high-speed circuit technologies and design methods that enable novel architectures. Our circuit technologies include asynchronous circuits, low-power circuits, and communication links. Our design methods include intellectual tools and computer-aided design tools to help with circuit design, implementation, and testing.

The VLSI Research group dates back to the beginning of Sun Labs. In 1990, Sun Microsystems formed Sun Labs by acquiring the consulting firm of Sutherland, Sproull, and Associates. That year, Ivan Sutherland and Bob Sproull founded the Asynchronous Circuits Research Group in Sun Labs to continue their work in understanding and applying asynchronous circuits to system design. Ivan and Bob, now retired from Sun/Oracle, became Sun Fellows and Vice Presidents. Later, the group changed its name to the "VLSI Research Group" and broadened its research scope.

As a research lab, we prototype solutions to future problems that we predict will confront Oracle engineered systems. Our efforts are most active in high-performance and low-energy VLSI technologies and design methods, and our technology demonstrations involve fabricated silicon test chips, software code, and design and test methodologies. To date we've attacked problems in low-energy communications, both on-chip and between chips; highly scalable computer systems designs; memory and compute-in-memory packaging and system architectures; design optimization; and CAD tools.

We collaborate broadly with university partners and U.S. Government agencies, and many group members are active in international technology communities, such as technological conference committees, journal editorial boards, and international technology prize juries.

The VLSI group is also the development center for the open-source Electric VLSI Design System (manual and users).

Publications

VLSI Research

VLSI Research

VLSI Research

Project Overview

Publications

Design Considerations of Monolithically Integrated Voltage Regulators for Multicore Processors

Formal Verification of Division and Square Root Implementations, an Oracle Report

Flying and Decoupling Capacitance Optimization for Area-Constrained On-Chip Switched-Capacitor Voltage Regulators

Modeling and Design of System-in-Package Integrated Voltage Regulator with Thermal Effects

Theorem Proving with ACL2 for Industry Artifacts

Using an Accurate Multi-Mode Chip Power Model to Analyze Power Integrity Differences between On-Board Voltage Regulator Modules (VRMs) and In-Package Integrated Voltage Converts (IVRs)

Finding Glitches Using Formal Methods

Efficient techniques for canceling transceiver noise

Dense WDM Silicon Photonic Interconnects for Compact High-end Computing Systems

Hybrid integrated silicon photonic bridge chips for ultralow energy inter-chip communications

Synchronizer Performance in Deep Sub-Micron Technology

A 4.6 GHz MDLL with -46dBc reference spur and aperture position tuning

Macrochip computer systems enabled by silicon photonic interconnects

Coupled Data Communication Techniques for High Performance and Low Power

The integration of silicon photonics and VLSI electronics for computing and switching systems

Low power silicon photonic transceivers

On-chip CMOS position sensors using coherent detection

Employing coherent detection for on-chip six-axis position sensors

Breaking the picojoule-per-bit barrier

Compacting high-end computing systems with dense WDM silicon photonic interconnects

Clocking links in multi-chip packages: a case study

Ultra-low power silicon photonic transceivers for inter/intra-chip interconnects

Optical interconnects in the data center

Optical interconnect for high-end computer systems

A macrochip interconnection network enabled by silicon nanophotonic devices

High bandwidth and low energy on-chip signaling with adaptive pre-emphasis in 90nm CMOS

How Open Source and Collaboration aid Innovation in VLSI CAD

Ultralow-power silicon photonic interconnect for high-performance computing systems

A sub-picojoule-per-bit CMOS photonic receiver for densely integrated systems

Ultralow-Power High-Performance Si Photonic Transmitter

A test platform for thermal, electrical, and mechanical characterization of packages

An ultra-low power all CMOS Si photonic transmitter

A Silicon photonic WDM network for high performance macrochip communications

Computing microsystems based on silicon photonic interconnects

3D visualization of integrated circuits in the Electric VLSI design system

Integrating novel packaging technologies for large-scale computer systems

Flat tree networks

Proximity interconnect flip-chip package with micron chip-to-chip alignment tolerances

Novel Packaging with Rematable Spring Interconnect Chips for MCMs

BGA package co-integration of electrical, optical, and capacitive interconnects

A modular synchronizing FIFO for NoCs

Synchroniser Behaviour and Analysis

The integration of silicon photonics and VLSI electronics for computing systems intra-connect

Communication in macrochips using silicon photonics for high-performance and low-energy computing

Enabling Technologies for Multi-Chip Integration using Proximity Communication

Trends from Ten Years of Soft Error Experimentation

To Yaeko, on the occasion of her retirement

Fault-tolerant distributed algorithms on VLSI chips

Dealing with Issues in VLSI Interconnect Scaling

VLSI CAD research at Sun Labs

High-radix crossbar switches enabled by proximity communication

A differential inequalities method for verified solution of IVPs for ODEs using linear programming for the search of tight bounds

VLSI tutorial

Silicon photonic WDM point-to-point network for multi-chip processor interconnects

TPE: A network of closely coupled computational elements

Optical proximity communication in packaged SiPhotonics

Synchrony and Asynchrony in VLSI

Optical interconnects for present and future high-performance computer systems

Ultrascale Nanophotonic Intrachip Communication for high-performance computing systems

Wonderland with kids

Gridless wire routing using cost functions and multiple processors

Multi-threading in Electric, a Java VLSI CAD Tool

Surveying external Electric users

Exploiting capacitors in high-performance computer systems

An abstract for the SCAN 2008 Symposium on Scientific Computing, Computer Arithmetic and Verified Numerical Computations

OpenSPARC: An Open Platform for Hardware Reliability Experimentation

Research in Industrial Labs: How Collaboration Aids Innovation (slides)

Research in Industrial Labs: How Collaboration Aids Innovation, (RealMedia video) (QuickTime video)

In memoriam Martin Rem

High-speed and low-energy capacitively-driven wires

Lessons from asynchronous design

Research challenges for on-chip interconnection networks

Measuring 6D chip alignment in multi-chip packages

Potentials of Group IV Photonics Interconnects for 'Red-shift' Computing Applications

Multi-terabit switch fabrics enabled by Proximity Communication