ASIC design in a next generation workstation

The activities of the design team formed for development of a follow-on machine to the Sparcstation 1 are discussed. The design team partitioned the design into four chips: the cache controller (CACHE+), memory management unit (MMU+), direct memory access (DMA+), and dynamic memory controller (RAM+). Architectural changes and higher integration eliminated two of the ASICs used on the Sparcstation 1 and dropped the usage of one of the ASICs from two to one part per board. One ASIC, a video controller, was reused. The manpower requirements of the project and the design/verification tools used by the design team are discussed.<>