The four degrees of 3D

摘要

On behalf of the steering committee and the technical program committee we welcome you to the 2004 International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD). This year ISPD is being held at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Phoenix, Arizona. ISPD provides a forum for the exchange of ideas, research, and new results in the area of physical design of VLSI systems. This 8th ISPD meeting evolved from the ACM/SIGDA Physical Design Workshops held intermittently during the years 1987-1996. In recent years, technology scaling has introduced deep sub micron effects and increased complexity into the physical design space. Not surprisingly, interest in physical design has grown dramatically. The number of researchers working in this area, and the set of new commercial interests in both start-ups and big companies show that in the nanometer age, physical design is economically critical and intellectually challenging.An outstanding set of technical papers has been selected for the program. All of these papers appear here in the paper and electronic versions of the proceedings. In addition, we will provide access to the foils presented at the conference for those authors who choose to allow that. Please check them out at our permanent web site: www.ispd.cc.The papers are complemented by talks from invited speakers and a panel discussion. The talks and panel, from both industry and academia, cover a wide range of topics ranging from immediate and pressing concerns to long term technological prognostications. We are delighted to start the symposium with a keynote address by Professor James Meindl of the Georgia Institute of Technology. His talk focuses on the future of interconnect, a topic he helped to pioneer. Monday afternoon wraps up with a panel discussion on the most controversial topic of the last ISPD: the long term future of buffering. Tuesday features no less than four invited sessions. The first is a session on regular circuit fabrics from three of the industrial players - NEC, Virage Logic, and Faraday, followed by a more speculative session on 3D design from IBM and MIT. Then, there are two invited talks on more immediate concerns: power aware clock design, by the Politechnico de Torino and BullDast/Accent, and CAD for FPGAs by UCLA and Hier Design. Finally, Wednesday includes an invited talk from IBM on a topic of perennial interest - how well flat and hierarchical design styles really work in practice.The symposium is sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation in cooperation with the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. Generous support has also been provided by (in alphabetical order): Cadence Design Systems, IBM Corp., Intel Corp., Magma Design Automation, and Synopsys.