IC Design Flow · Topic 1 of 9
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IC Design FlowLesson 1 of 9
Architecture
Defining what the chip does and how its blocks are organised.
What you’ll learn
- What chip architecture decides
- Specification and trade-offs
- Where the flow begins
Why it matters
Architecture sets the performance, power, and area envelope before any gate is drawn.
Explanation
Architecture translates product requirements into a high-level structure: what processing blocks exist, how they connect, memory hierarchy, and interfaces. Key trade-offs are performance, power, area, and cost (PPA/C).
Decisions here dominate the outcome — no downstream step can fully fix a poor architecture.
Visual explanation
Key terminology
- PPA
- Performance, power, and area — the core design trade-offs.
- Microarchitecture
- The internal organisation implementing an instruction set.
Example
Choosing core count, cache sizes, and bus width is an architectural decision.
Common mistakes
Watch out for:
- Assuming later optimisation can rescue a weak architecture — it usually can't.
Real-world application
Architecture choices differentiate a mobile SoC from a datacentre CPU.
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IC Design Flow
Describing behaviour at the register-transfer level in an HDL.
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IC Design Flow