Digital Logic Testing and Simulation, 2nd Edition

PREFACE

About one and a half decades ago the state of the art in DRAMs was 64K bytes, a typical personal computer (PC) was implemented with about 60 to 100 dual in-line packages (DIPs), and the VAX11/780 was a favorite platform for electronic design automation (EDA) developers. It delivered computational power rated at about one MIP (million instructions per second), and several users frequently shared this machine through VT100 terminals.

Now, CPU performance and DRAM capacity have increased by more than three orders of magnitude. The venerable VAX11/780, once a benchmark for performance comparison and host for virtually all EDA programs, has been relegated to museums, replaced by vastly more powerful PCs, implemented with fewer than a half dozen integrated circuits (ICs), at a fraction of the cost. Experts predict that shrinking geometries, and resultant increase in performance, will continue for at least another 10 to 15 years.

Already, it is becoming a challenge to use the available real estate on a die. Whereas in the original Pentium design various teams vied for a few hundred additional transistors on the die,¹ it is now becoming increasingly difficult for a design team to use all of the available transistors.²

The ubiquitous 8-bit microcontroller appears in entertainment products and in automobiles; billions are sold each year. Gordon Moore, Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corp., ...