Keynote speaker

Abstract

SoCC started out as the IEEE ASIC Conference, moved to ASIC/SOC, and then to its current title SoCC. As the number of transistors on a chip has increased, designers have found it useful to include, in addition to the processor, a lot of system stuff that is in many ways orthogonal to the processor. We will soon reach the point where each chip will contain 50 billion transistors. Even after we take into account all the system stuff, there will still be a huge number of transistors available for our use. How do we harness them? The trend so far has been to increase the number of processor cores? I submit that there is a better way: the return of the ASIC. In this talk I will discuss why the ASIC will be particularly important for the microprocessor of 2020, and what we must do differently between now and then if we are to effectively exploit ASICs to the benefit of high performance chips.