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97-433: The Verilog-AMS standard was created with the intent of enabling designers of analog and mixed signal systems and integrated circuits to create and use modules that encapsulate high-level behavioral descriptions as well as structural descriptions of systems and components. Verilog-AMS is an industry standard modeling language for mixed signal circuits. It provides both continuous-time and event-driven modeling semantics, and so

194-448: A DAC which is an example for analog processing which is triggered by a digital signal: The ADC model is reading analog signals in the digital blocks: While the language was initially only supported by commercial companies, parts of the behavioural modeling subset, "Verilog-A" was adopted by the transistor-modeling community. The ADMS translator supports it for open-source simulators like Xyce and ngSPICE. A more complete implementation

291-625: A band gap of zero and thus cannot be used in transistors because of its constant conductivity, an inability to turn off. The zigzag edges of the nanoribbons introduce localized energy states in the conduction and valence bands and thus a bandgap that enables switching when fabricated as a transistor. As an example, a typical GNR of width of 10 nm has a desirable bandgap energy of 0.4 eV. ) More research will need to be performed, however, on sub-50 nm graphene layers, as its resistivity value increases and thus electron mobility decreases. In April 2005, Gordon Moore stated in an interview that

388-484: A programming language such as C or ALGOL ; it is a textual description consisting of expressions, statements and control structures. One important difference between most programming languages and HDLs is that HDLs explicitly include the notion of time. HDLs form an integral part of electronic design automation (EDA) systems, especially for complex circuits, such as application-specific integrated circuits , microprocessors , and programmable logic devices . Due to

485-542: A self-fulfilling prophecy . The doubling period is often misquoted as 18 months because of a separate prediction by Moore's colleague, Intel executive David House . In 1975, House noted that Moore's revised law of doubling transistor count every 2 years in turn implied that computer chip performance would roughly double every 18 months (with no increase in power consumption). Mathematically, Moore's law predicted that transistor count would double every 2 years due to shrinking transistor dimensions and other improvements. As

582-472: A test bench ). At minimum, a testbench contains an instantiation of the model (called the device under test or DUT), pin/signal declarations for the model's I/O, and a clock waveform. The testbench code is event driven: the engineer writes HDL statements to implement the (testbench-generated) reset-signal, to model interface transactions (such as a host–bus read/write), and to monitor the DUT's output. An HDL simulator —

679-405: A "simulation" netlist with gate-delay information, a "handoff" netlist for post-synthesis placement and routing on a semiconductor die, or a generic industry-standard Electronic Design Interchange Format (EDIF) (for subsequent conversion to a JEDEC -format file). On the other hand, a software compiler converts the source-code listing into a microprocessor -specific object code for execution on

776-479: A basic measure of value for a digital camera, demonstrating the historical linearity (on a log scale) of this market and the opportunity to predict the future trend of digital camera price, LCD and LED screens, and resolution. The great Moore's law compensator (TGMLC) , also known as Wirth's law – generally is referred to as software bloat and is the principle that successive generations of computer software increase in size and complexity, thereby offsetting

873-459: A consequence of shrinking dimensions, Dennard scaling predicted that power consumption per unit area would remain constant. Combining these effects, David House deduced that computer chip performance would roughly double every 18 months. Also due to Dennard scaling, this increased performance would not be accompanied by increased power, i.e., the energy-efficiency of silicon -based computer chips roughly doubles every 18 months. Dennard scaling ended in

970-483: A factor of two per year". Dennard scaling – This posits that power usage would decrease in proportion to area (both voltage and current being proportional to length) of transistors. Combined with Moore's law, performance per watt would grow at roughly the same rate as transistor density, doubling every 1–2 years. According to Dennard scaling transistor dimensions would be scaled by 30% (0.7×) every technology generation, thus reducing their area by 50%. This would reduce

1067-473: A few years, VHDL and Verilog emerged as the dominant HDLs in the electronics industry, while older and less capable HDLs gradually disappeared from use. However, VHDL and Verilog share many of the same limitations, such as being unsuitable for analog or mixed-signal circuit simulation. Specialized HDLs (such as Confluence) were introduced with the explicit goal of fixing specific limitations of Verilog and VHDL, though none were ever intended to replace them. Over

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1164-891: A functional transistor. Below are several non-silicon substitutes in the fabrication of small nanometer transistors. One proposed material is indium gallium arsenide , or InGaAs. Compared to their silicon and germanium counterparts, InGaAs transistors are more promising for future high-speed, low-power logic applications. Because of intrinsic characteristics of III–V compound semiconductors , quantum well and tunnel effect transistors based on InGaAs have been proposed as alternatives to more traditional MOSFET designs. Biological computing research shows that biological material has superior information density and energy efficiency compared to silicon-based computing. Various forms of graphene are being studied for graphene electronics , e.g. graphene nanoribbon transistors have shown promise since its appearance in publications in 2008. (Bulk graphene has

1261-538: A fundamental limit. By then they'll be able to make bigger chips and have transistor budgets in the billions. In 2016 the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors , after using Moore's Law to drive the industry since 1998, produced its final roadmap. It no longer centered its research and development plan on Moore's law. Instead, it outlined what might be called the More than Moore strategy in which

1358-605: A hardware description language. The first hardware description languages appeared in the late 1960s, looking like more traditional languages. The first that had a lasting effect was described in 1971 in C. Gordon Bell and Allen Newell's text Computer Structures . This text introduced the concept of register transfer level , first used in the ISP language to describe the behavior of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-8 . The language became more widespread with

1455-435: A hierarchy of blocks are properly classified as netlist languages used in electric computer-aided design . HDL can be used to express designs in structural, behavioral or register-transfer-level architectures for the same circuit functionality; in the latter two cases the synthesizer decides the architecture and logic gate layout. HDLs are used to write executable specifications for hardware. A program designed to implement

1552-489: A higher level of abstraction than simulation at the schematic level, and thus increased design capacity from hundreds of transistors to thousands. In 1986, with the support of the U.S Department of Defense, VHDL was sponsored as an IEEE standard (IEEE Std 1076), and the first IEEE-standardized version of VHDL, IEEE Std 1076-1987, was approved in December 1987. Cadence Design Systems later acquired Gateway Design Automation for

1649-426: A log–linear relationship between device complexity (higher circuit density at reduced cost) and time. In a 2015 interview, Moore noted of the 1965 article: "... I just did a wild extrapolation saying it's going to continue to double every year for the next 10 years." One historian of the law cites Stigler's law of eponymy , to introduce the fact that the regular doubling of components was known to many working in

1746-578: A non-planar tri-gate FinFET at 22 nm in 2012 that is faster and consumes less power than a conventional planar transistor. The rate of performance improvement for single-core microprocessors has slowed significantly. Single-core performance was improving by 52% per year in 1986–2003 and 23% per year in 2003–2011, but slowed to just seven percent per year in 2011–2018. Quality adjusted price of IT equipment – The price of information technology (IT), computers and peripheral equipment, adjusted for quality and inflation, declined 16% per year on average over

1843-422: A physical limit, some forecasters are optimistic about the continuation of technological progress in a variety of other areas, including new chip architectures, quantum computing, and AI and machine learning. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang declared Moore's law dead in 2022; several days later, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger countered with the opposite claim. Digital electronics have contributed to world economic growth in

1940-445: A physically realizable form, the design database becomes progressively more laden with technology-specific information, which cannot be stored in a generic HDL description. Finally, an integrated circuit is manufactured or programmed for use. Essential to HDL design is the ability to simulate HDL programs. Simulation allows an HDL description of a design (called a model) to pass design verification , an important milestone that validates

2037-449: A precise, formal description of an electronic circuit that allows for the automated analysis and simulation of the circuit. It also allows for the synthesis of an HDL description into a netlist (a specification of physical electronic components and how they are connected together), which can then be placed and routed to produce the set of masks used to create an integrated circuit . A hardware description language looks much like

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2134-464: A property is a factual statement about the expected or assumed behavior of another object. Ideally, for a given HDL description, a property or properties can be proven true or false using formal mathematical methods. In practical terms, many properties cannot be proven because they occupy an unbounded solution space . However, if provided a set of operating assumptions or constraints, a property checker can prove (or disprove) certain properties by narrowing

2231-447: A result of the efficiency gains realized using HDL, a majority of modern digital circuit design revolves around it. Most designs begin as a set of requirements or a high-level architectural diagram. Control and decision structures are often prototyped in flowchart applications, or entered in a editor. The process of writing the HDL description is highly dependent on the nature of the circuit and

2328-443: A single quarter-square-inch (~  1.6 cm ) semiconductor. The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. Moore posited

2425-426: A suite of debug tools. These allow the user to stop and restart the simulation at any time, insert simulator breakpoints (independent of the HDL code), and monitor or modify any element in the HDL model hierarchy. Modern simulators can also link the HDL environment to user-compiled libraries, through a defined PLI / VHPI interface. Linking is system-dependent ( x86 , SPARC etc. running Windows / Linux / Solaris ), as

2522-585: A year 2000 computer. Library expansion – was calculated in 1945 by Fremont Rider to double in capacity every 16 years, if sufficient space were made available. He advocated replacing bulky, decaying printed works with miniaturized microform analog photographs, which could be duplicated on-demand for library patrons or other institutions. He did not foresee the digital technology that would follow decades later to replace analog microform with digital imaging, storage, and transmission media. Automated, potentially lossless digital technologies allowed vast increases in

2619-507: Is "a natural part of the history of Moore's law". The rate of improvement in physical dimensions known as Dennard scaling also ended in the mid-2000s. As a result, much of the semiconductor industry has shifted its focus to the needs of major computing applications rather than semiconductor scaling. Nevertheless, leading semiconductor manufacturers TSMC and Samsung Electronics have claimed to keep pace with Moore's law with 10 , 7 , and 5 nm nodes in mass production. As

2716-400: Is another version, called Butters' Law of Photonics, a formulation that deliberately parallels Moore's law. Butters' law says that the amount of data coming out of an optical fiber is doubling every nine months. Thus, the cost of transmitting a bit over an optical network decreases by half every nine months. The availability of wavelength-division multiplexing (sometimes called WDM) increased

2813-461: Is certainly possible to represent hardware semantics using traditional programming languages such as C++ , which operate on control flow semantics as opposed to data flow , although to function as such, programs must be augmented with extensive and unwieldy class libraries . Generally, however, software programming languages do not include any capability for explicitly expressing time, and thus cannot function as hardware description languages. Before

2910-432: Is growing desire in the industry for a single language that can perform some tasks of both hardware design and software programming. SystemC is an example of such— embedded system hardware can be modeled as non-detailed architectural blocks ( black boxes with modeled signal inputs and output drivers). The target application is written in C or C++ and natively compiled for the host-development system; as opposed to targeting

3007-500: Is named after Gordon Moore , the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel (and former CEO of the latter), who in 1965 noted that the number of components per integrated circuit had been doubling every year , and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade. In 1975, looking forward to the next decade, he revised the forecast to doubling every two years, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 41%. Moore's empirical evidence did not directly imply that

Verilog-AMS - Misplaced Pages Continue

3104-607: Is now available through OpenVAF. The post-SPICE simulator Gnucap was designed in accordance with the standard document, and its support for Verilog-AMS for both the simulator level and the behavioral modeling is growing. Hardware description language In computer engineering , a hardware description language ( HDL ) is a specialized computer language used to describe the structure and behavior of electronic circuits , usually to design application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and to program field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). A hardware description language enables

3201-568: Is still in its infancy, but is expected to become an integral part of the HDL design toolset. An HDL is grossly similar to a software programming language , but there are major differences. Most programming languages are inherently procedural (single-threaded), with limited syntactical and semantic support to handle concurrency . HDLs, on the other hand, resemble concurrent programming languages in their ability to model multiple parallel processes (such as flip-flops and adders ) that automatically execute independently of one another. Any change to

3298-442: Is suitable for analog, digital, and mixed analog/digital circuits. It is particularly well suited for verification of very complex analog, mixed-signal and RF integrated circuits. Verilog and Verilog/AMS are not procedural programming languages, but event-based hardware description languages (HDLs). As such, they provide sophisticated and powerful language features for definition and synchronization of parallel actions and events. On

3395-572: The 22 nm feature width around 2012, and continuing at 14 nm . Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO, stated at the end of 2023 that "we're no longer in the golden era of Moore's Law, it's much, much harder now, so we're probably doubling effectively closer to every three years now, so we've definitely seen a slowing." The physical limits to transistor scaling have been reached due to source-to-drain leakage, limited gate metals and limited options for channel material. Other approaches are being investigated, which do not rely on physical scaling. These include

3492-583: The Catapult C tools from Mentor Graphics , and the Impulse C tools from Impulse Accelerated Technologies. A similar initiative from Intel is the use of Data Parallel C++, related to SYCL , as a high-level synthesis language. Annapolis Micro Systems , Inc.'s CoreFire Design Suite and National Instruments LabVIEW FPGA provide a graphical dataflow approach to high-level design entry and languages such as SystemVerilog , SystemVHDL, and Handel-C seek to accomplish

3589-548: The Data General Eclipse MV/8000 , and commercial need began to grow for a language that could map well to them. By 1983 Data I/O introduced ABEL to fill that need. In 1985, as design shifted to VLSI, Gateway Design Automation introduced Verilog , and Intermetrics released the first completed version of the VHSIC Hardware Description Language ( VHDL ). VHDL was developed at the behest of

3686-524: The United States Department of Defense 's Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Program (VHSIC), and was based on the Ada programming language , and on the experience gained with the earlier development of ISPS. Initially, Verilog and VHDL were used to document and simulate circuit designs already captured and described in another form (such as schematic files). HDL simulation enabled engineers to work at

3783-479: The gate-all-around MOSFET ( GAAFET ) structure has even better gate control. Microprocessor architects report that semiconductor advancement has slowed industry-wide since around 2010, below the pace predicted by Moore's law. Brian Krzanich, the former CEO of Intel, announced, "Our cadence today is closer to two and a half years than two." Intel stated in 2015 that improvements in MOSFET devices have slowed, starting at

3880-468: The 2000s. Koomey later showed that a similar rate of efficiency improvement predated silicon chips and Moore's law, for technologies such as vacuum tubes. Microprocessor architects report that since around 2010, semiconductor advancement has slowed industry-wide below the pace predicted by Moore's law. Brian Krzanich , the former CEO of Intel, cited Moore's 1975 revision as a precedent for the current deceleration, which results from technical challenges and

3977-598: The HDL simulator environment, as the early stage of the design is subject to frequent and major circuit changes. An HDL description can also be prototyped and tested in hardware — programmable logic devices are often used for this purpose. Hardware prototyping is comparatively more expensive than HDL simulation, but offers a real-world view of the design. Prototyping is the best way to check interfacing against other hardware devices and hardware prototypes. Even those running on slow FPGAs offer much shorter simulation times than pure HDL simulation. Historically, design verification

Verilog-AMS - Misplaced Pages Continue

4074-399: The HDL simulator and user libraries are compiled and linked outside the HDL environment. Design verification is often the most time-consuming portion of the design process, due to the disconnect between a device's functional specification , the designer's interpretation of the specification, and the imprecision of the HDL language. The majority of the initial test/debug cycle is conducted in

4171-701: The Verilog-AMS committee was a single language for both analog and digital design, however due to delays in the merger process it remains at Accellera while Verilog evolved into SystemVerilog and went to the IEEE. Verilog/AMS is a superset of the Verilog digital HDL, so all statements in digital domain work as in Verilog (see there for examples). All analog parts work as in Verilog-A . The following code example in Verilog-AMS shows

4268-564: The abstraction level of hardware design in order to reduce the complexity of programming in HDLs, creating a sub-field called high-level synthesis . Companies such as Cadence , Synopsys and Agility Design Solutions are promoting SystemC as a way to combine high-level languages with concurrency models to allow faster design cycles for FPGAs than is possible using traditional HDLs. Approaches based on standard C or C++ (with libraries or other extensions allowing parallel programming) are found in

4365-498: The breakdown is that at small sizes, current leakage poses greater challenges, and also causes the chip to heat up, which creates a threat of thermal runaway and therefore, further increases energy costs. The breakdown of Dennard scaling prompted a greater focus on multicore processors, but the gains offered by switching to more cores are lower than the gains that would be achieved had Dennard scaling continued. In another departure from Dennard scaling, Intel microprocessors adopted

4462-508: The capacity that could be placed on a single fiber by as much as a factor of 100. Optical networking and dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) is rapidly bringing down the cost of networking, and further progress seems assured. As a result, the wholesale price of data traffic collapsed in the dot-com bubble . Nielsen's Law says that the bandwidth available to users increases by 50% annually. Pixels per dollar – Similarly, Barry Hendy of Kodak Australia has plotted pixels per dollar as

4559-828: The cause of the productivity acceleration to technological innovations in the production of semiconductors that sharply reduced the prices of such components and of the products that contain them (as well as expanding the capabilities of such products)." The primary negative implication of Moore's law is that obsolescence pushes society up against the Limits to Growth . As technologies continue to rapidly "improve", they render predecessor technologies obsolete. In situations in which security and survivability of hardware or data are paramount, or in which resources are limited, rapid obsolescence often poses obstacles to smooth or continued operations. Several measures of digital technology are improving at exponential rates related to Moore's law, including

4656-428: The code is synthesized. In industry parlance, HDL design generally ends at the synthesis stage. Once the synthesis tool has mapped the HDL description into a gate netlist, the netlist is passed off to the back-end stage. Depending on the physical technology ( FPGA , ASIC gate array , ASIC standard cell ), HDLs may or may not play a significant role in the back-end flow. In general, as the design flow progresses toward

4753-409: The cost of computer power to the consumer falls, the cost for producers to fulfill Moore's law follows an opposite trend: R&D, manufacturing, and test costs have increased steadily with each new generation of chips. The cost of the tools, principally EUVL ( Extreme ultraviolet lithography ), used to manufacture chips doubles every 4 years. Rising manufacturing costs are an important consideration for

4850-812: The delay by 30% (0.7×) and therefore increase operating frequency by about 40% (1.4×). Finally, to keep electric field constant, voltage would be reduced by 30%, reducing energy by 65% and power (at 1.4× frequency) by 50%. Therefore, in every technology generation transistor density would double, circuit becomes 40% faster, while power consumption (with twice the number of transistors) stays the same. Dennard scaling ended in 2005–2010, due to leakage currents. The exponential processor transistor growth predicted by Moore does not always translate into exponentially greater practical CPU performance. Since around 2005–2007, Dennard scaling has ended, so even though Moore's law continued after that, it has not yielded proportional dividends in improved performance. The primary reason cited for

4947-450: The density of transistors at which the cost per transistor is the lowest. As more transistors are put on a chip, the cost to make each transistor decreases, but the chance that the chip will not work due to a defect increases. In 1965, Moore examined the density of transistors at which cost is minimized, and observed that, as transistors were made smaller through advances in photolithography , this number would increase at "a rate of roughly

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5044-433: The design's intended function (specification) against the code implementation in the HDL description. It also permits architectural exploration. The engineer can experiment with design choices by writing multiple variations of a base design, then comparing their behavior in simulation. Thus, simulation is critical for successful HDL design. To simulate an HDL model, an engineer writes a top-level simulation environment (called

5141-432: The designer's preference for coding style. The HDL is merely the 'capture language', often beginning with a high-level algorithmic description such as a C++ mathematical model. Designers often use scripting languages such as Perl to automatically generate repetitive circuit structures in the HDL language. Special text editors offer features for automatic indentation, syntax-dependent coloration, and macro -based expansion of

5238-400: The disk media, thermal stability, and writability using available magnetic fields. Fiber-optic capacity – The number of bits per second that can be sent down an optical fiber increases exponentially, faster than Moore's law. Keck's law , in honor of Donald Keck . Network capacity – According to Gerald Butters, the former head of Lucent's Optical Networking Group at Bell Labs, there

5335-618: The embedded CPU, which requires host-simulation of the embedded CPU or an emulated CPU. The high level of abstraction of SystemC models is well suited to early architecture exploration , as architectural modifications can be easily evaluated with little concern for signal-level implementation issues. However, the threading model used in SystemC relies on shared memory , causing the language not to handle parallel execution or low-level models well. In their level of abstraction, HDLs have been compared to assembly languages . There are attempts to raise

5432-485: The entity/architecture/signal declaration. The HDL code then undergoes a code review, or auditing. In preparation for synthesis, the HDL description is subject to an array of automated checkers. The checkers report deviations from standardized code guidelines, identify potential ambiguous code constructs before they can cause misinterpretation, and check for common logical coding errors, such as floating ports or shorted outputs. This process aids in resolving errors before

5529-627: The exploding complexity of digital electronic circuits since the 1970s (see Moore's law ), circuit designers needed digital logic descriptions to be performed at a high level without being tied to a specific electronic technology, such as ECL , TTL or CMOS . HDLs were created to implement register-transfer level abstraction, a model of the data flow and timing of a circuit. There are two major hardware description languages: VHDL and Verilog . There are different types of description in them: "dataflow, behavioral and structural". Example of dataflow of VHDL: HDLs are standard text-based expressions of

5626-436: The field. In 1974, Robert H. Dennard at IBM recognized the rapid MOSFET scaling technology and formulated what became known as Dennard scaling , which describes that as MOS transistors get smaller, their power density stays constant such that the power use remains in proportion with area. Evidence from the semiconductor industry shows that this inverse relationship between power density and areal density broke down in

5723-454: The five decades from 1959 to 2009. The pace accelerated, however, to 23% per year in 1995–1999 triggered by faster IT innovation, and later, slowed to 2% per year in 2010–2013. While quality-adjusted microprocessor price improvement continues, the rate of improvement likewise varies, and is not linear on a log scale. Microprocessor price improvement accelerated during the late 1990s, reaching 60% per year (halving every nine months) versus

5820-442: The historical trend would continue, nevertheless his prediction has held since 1975 and has since become known as a "law". Moore's prediction has been used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development , thus functioning to some extent as a self-fulfilling prophecy . Advancements in digital electronics , such as the reduction in quality-adjusted microprocessor prices,

5917-547: The increase in memory capacity ( RAM and flash ), the improvement of sensors , and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras , are strongly linked to Moore's law. These ongoing changes in digital electronics have been a driving force of technological and social change, productivity , and economic growth. Industry experts have not reached a consensus on exactly when Moore's law will cease to apply. Microprocessor architects report that semiconductor advancement has slowed industry-wide since around 2010, slightly below

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6014-425: The introduction of System Verilog in 2002, C++ integration with a logic simulator was one of the few ways to use object-oriented programming in hardware verification. System Verilog is the first major HDL to offer object orientation and garbage collection. Using the proper subset of hardware description language, a program called a synthesizer, or logic synthesis tool , can infer hardware logic operations from

6111-636: The introduction of DEC's PDP-16 RT-Level Modules (RTMs) and a book describing their use. At least two implementations of the basic ISP language (ISPL and ISPS) followed. ISPS was well suited to describe relations between the inputs and the outputs of the design and was quickly adopted by commercial teams at DEC, and by several research teams in the US and among its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ( NATO ). The RTM products never succeeded commercially and DEC stopped marketing them in

6208-444: The key economic indicator of innovation." Moore's law describes a driving force of technological and social change, productivity, and economic growth. An acceleration in the rate of semiconductor progress contributed to a surge in U.S. productivity growth, which reached 3.4% per year in 1997–2004, outpacing the 1.6% per year during both 1972–1996 and 2005–2013. As economist Richard G. Anderson notes, "Numerous studies have traced

6305-465: The key technical challenges of engineering future nanoscale transistors is the design of gates. As device dimensions shrink, controlling the current flow in the thin channel becomes more difficult. Modern nanoscale transistors typically take the form of multi-gate MOSFETs , with the FinFET being the most common nanoscale transistor. The FinFET has gate dielectric on three sides of the channel. In comparison,

6402-424: The language statements and produce an equivalent netlist of generic hardware primitives to implement the specified behaviour. Synthesizers generally ignore the expression of any timing constructs in the text. Digital logic synthesizers, for example, generally use clock edges as the way to time the circuit, ignoring any timing constructs. The ability to have a synthesizable subset of the language does not itself make

6499-400: The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The primary driving force of economic growth is the growth of productivity , which Moore's law factors into. Moore (1995) expected that "the rate of technological progress is going to be controlled from financial realities". The reverse could and did occur around the late-1990s, however, with economists reporting that "Productivity growth is

6596-504: The mid-1980s, as new methods grew more popular, more so very-large-scale integration (VLSI). Separate work done about 1979 at the University of Kaiserslautern produced a language called KARL ("KAiserslautern Register Transfer Language"), which included design calculus language features supporting VLSI chip floorplanning and structured hardware design. This work was also the basis of KARL's interactive graphic sister language ABL, whose name

6693-427: The mid-2000s. At the 1975 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting , Moore revised his forecast rate, predicting semiconductor complexity would continue to double annually until about 1980, after which it would decrease to a rate of doubling approximately every two years. He outlined several contributing factors for this exponential behavior: Shortly after 1975, Caltech professor Carver Mead popularized

6790-482: The most complex chips. The graph at the top of this article shows this trend holds true today. As of 2017 , the commercially available processor possessing the highest number of transistors is the 48 core Centriq with over 18 billion transistors. Density at minimum cost per transistor – This is the formulation given in Moore's 1965 paper. It is not just about the density of transistors that can be achieved, but about

6887-493: The needs of applications drive chip development, rather than a focus on semiconductor scaling. Application drivers range from smartphones to AI to data centers. IEEE began a road-mapping initiative in 2016, "Rebooting Computing", named the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS). Some forecasters, including Gordon Moore, predict that Moore's law will end by around 2025. Although Moore's Law will reach

6984-571: The other hand, many actions defined in HDL program statements can run in parallel (somewhat similar to threads and tasklets in procedural languages, but much more fine-grained). However, Verilog/AMS can be coupled with procedural languages like the ANSI C language using the Verilog Procedural Interface of the simulator, which eases testsuite implementation, and allows interaction with legacy code or testbench equipment. The original intention of

7081-508: The pace predicted by Moore's law. In September 2022, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang considered Moore's law dead, while Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger was of the opposite view. In 1959, Douglas Engelbart studied the projected downscaling of integrated circuit (IC) size, publishing his results in the article "Microelectronics, and the Art of Similitude". Engelbart presented his findings at the 1960 International Solid-State Circuits Conference , where Moore

7178-543: The part of the designer; compared to a traditional schematic layout, synthesized RTL netlists were almost always larger in area and slower in performance . A circuit design from a skilled engineer, using labor-intensive schematic-capture/hand-layout, would almost always outperform its logically-synthesized equivalent, but the productivity advantage held by synthesis soon displaced digital schematic capture to exactly those areas that were problematic for RTL synthesis: extremely high-speed, low-power, or asynchronous circuitry. Within

7275-506: The performance gains predicted by Moore's law. In a 2008 article in InfoWorld , Randall C. Kennedy, formerly of Intel, introduces this term using successive versions of Microsoft Office between the year 2000 and 2007 as his premise. Despite the gains in computational performance during this time period according to Moore's law, Office 2007 performed the same task at half the speed on a prototypical year 2007 computer as compared to Office 2000 on

7372-483: The process and emphasizing automation, reuse, and validation. Moore%27s law Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics , it is an empirical relationship . It is an experience-curve law , a type of law quantifying efficiency gains from experience in production. The observation

7469-416: The process's input automatically triggers an update in the simulator's process stack. Both programming languages and HDLs are processed by a compiler (often called a synthesizer in the HDL case), but with different goals. For HDLs, "compiling" refers to logic synthesis ; the process of transforming the HDL code listing into a physically realizable gate netlist . The netlist output can take any of many forms:

7566-410: The program that executes the testbench — maintains the simulator clock, which is the master reference for all events in the testbench simulation. Events occur only at the instants dictated by the testbench HDL (such as a reset-toggle coded into the testbench), or in reaction (by the model) to stimulus and triggering events. Modern HDL simulators have full-featured graphical user interfaces , complete with

7663-550: The projection cannot be sustained indefinitely: "It can't continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens." He also noted that transistors eventually would reach the limits of miniaturization at atomic levels: In terms of size [of transistors] you can see that we're approaching the size of atoms which is a fundamental barrier, but it'll be two or three generations before we get that far—but that's as far out as we've ever been able to see. We have another 10 to 20 years before we reach

7760-437: The rapid (in some cases hyperexponential) decreases in cost, and increases in performance, of a variety of technologies, including DNA sequencing, DNA synthesis, and a range of physical and computational tools used in protein expression and in determining protein structures. Eroom's law – is a pharmaceutical drug development observation that was deliberately written as Moore's Law spelled backwards in order to contrast it with

7857-499: The rapidity of information growth in an era that now sometimes is called the Information Age . Carlson curve – is a term coined by The Economist to describe the biotechnological equivalent of Moore's law, and is named after author Rob Carlson. Carlson accurately predicted that the doubling time of DNA sequencing technologies (measured by cost and performance) would be at least as fast as Moore's law. Carlson Curves illustrate

7954-486: The rights to Verilog-XL, the HDL simulator that would become the de facto standard of Verilog simulators for the next decade. The introduction of logic synthesis for HDLs pushed HDLs from the background into the foreground of digital design. Synthesis tools compiled HDL source files (written in a constrained format called RTL) into a manufacturable netlist description in terms of gates and transistors . Writing synthesizable RTL files required practice and discipline on

8051-1007: The same goal, but are aimed at making existing hardware engineers more productive, rather than making FPGAs more accessible to existing software engineers . It is also possible to design hardware modules using MATLAB and Simulink using the MathWorks HDL Coder tool or DSP Builder for Intel FPGAs or Xilinx System Generator (XSG) from Xilinx . The two most widely used and well-supported HDL varieties used in industry are Verilog and VHDL . Several projects exist for defining printed circuit board connectivity using language based, textual-entry methods. Among these, new approaches have emerged that focus on enhancing readability, reusability, and validation. These modern methodologies employ open-source design languages specifically tailored for electronics, adopting declarative markup to specify what circuits should achieve. This shift integrates software development principles into hardware design, streamlining

8148-526: The semiconductor industry that on a semi-log plot approximates a straight line. I hesitate to review its origins and by doing so restrict its definition." Hard disk drive areal density – A similar prediction (sometimes called Kryder's law ) was made in 2005 for hard disk drive areal density . The prediction was later viewed as over-optimistic. Several decades of rapid progress in areal density slowed around 2010, from 30 to 100% per year to 10–15% per year, because of noise related to smaller grain size of

8245-419: The size, cost, density, and speed of components. Moore wrote only about the density of components, "a component being a transistor, resistor, diode or capacitor", at minimum cost. Transistors per integrated circuit – The most popular formulation is of the doubling of the number of transistors on ICs every two years. At the end of the 1970s, Moore's law became known as the limit for the number of transistors on

8342-415: The solution space. The assertions do not model circuit activity, but capture and document the designer's intent in the HDL code. In a simulation environment, the simulator evaluates all specified assertions, reporting the location and severity of any violations. In a synthesis environment, the synthesis tool usually operates with the policy of halting synthesis upon any violation. Assertion based verification

8439-461: The spin state of electron spintronics , tunnel junctions , and advanced confinement of channel materials via nano-wire geometry. Spin-based logic and memory options are being developed actively in labs. The vast majority of current transistors on ICs are composed principally of doped silicon and its alloys. As silicon is fabricated into single nanometer transistors, short-channel effects adversely change desired material properties of silicon as

8536-419: The structure of electronic systems and their behaviour over time. Like concurrent programming languages, HDL syntax and semantics include explicit notations for expressing concurrency . However, in contrast to most software programming languages , HDLs also include an explicit notion of time, which is a primary attribute of hardware. Languages whose only characteristic is to express circuit connectivity between

8633-822: The sustaining of Moore's law. This led to the formulation of Moore's second law , also called Rock's law (named after Arthur Rock ), which is that the capital cost of a semiconductor fabrication plant also increases exponentially over time. Numerous innovations by scientists and engineers have sustained Moore's law since the beginning of the IC era. Some of the key innovations are listed below, as examples of breakthroughs that have advanced integrated circuit and semiconductor device fabrication technology, allowing transistor counts to grow by more than seven orders of magnitude in less than five decades. Computer industry technology road maps predicted in 2001 that Moore's law would continue for several generations of semiconductor chips. One of

8730-455: The target microprocessor. As HDLs and programming languages borrow concepts and features from each other, the boundary between them is becoming less distinct. However, pure HDLs are unsuitable for general purpose application software development, just as general-purpose programming languages are undesirable for modeling hardware. Yet as electronic systems grow increasingly complex, and reconfigurable systems become increasingly common, there

8827-400: The term "Moore's law". Moore's law eventually came to be widely accepted as a goal for the semiconductor industry, and it was cited by competitive semiconductor manufacturers as they strove to increase processing power. Moore viewed his eponymous law as surprising and optimistic: "Moore's law is a violation of Murphy's law . Everything gets better and better." The observation was even seen as

8924-489: The typical 30% improvement rate (halving every two years) during the years earlier and later. Laptop microprocessors in particular improved 25–35% per year in 2004–2010, and slowed to 15–25% per year in 2010–2013. The number of transistors per chip cannot explain quality-adjusted microprocessor prices fully. Moore's 1995 paper does not limit Moore's law to strict linearity or to transistor count, "The definition of 'Moore's Law' has come to refer to almost anything related to

9021-527: The underlying semantics of the language statements and simulate the progress of time provides the hardware designer with the ability to model a piece of hardware before it is created physically. It is this executability that gives HDLs the illusion of being programming languages , when they are more precisely classified as specification languages or modeling languages . Simulators capable of supporting discrete-event (digital) and continuous-time (analog) modeling exist, and HDLs targeted for each are available. It

9118-431: The years, much effort has been invested in improving HDLs. The latest iteration of Verilog, formally known as IEEE 1800-2005 SystemVerilog, introduces many new features (classes, random variables, and properties/assertions) to address the growing need for better test bench randomization, design hierarchy, and reuse. A future revision of VHDL is also in development , and is expected to match SystemVerilog's improvements. As

9215-520: Was a laborious, repetitive loop of writing and running simulation test cases against the design under test. As chip designs have grown larger and more complex, the task of design verification has grown to the point where it now dominates the schedule of a design team. Looking for ways to improve design productivity, the electronic design automation industry developed the Property Specification Language . In formal verification terms,

9312-877: Was an initialism for "A Block diagram Language". ABL was implemented in the early 1980s by the Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecomunicazioni ( CSELT ) in Torino, Italy, producing the ABLED graphic VLSI design editor. In the mid-1980s, a VLSI design framework was implemented around KARL and ABL by an international consortium funded by the Commission of the European Union. By the late 1970s, design using programmable logic devices (PLDs) became popular, although these designs were primarily limited to designing finite-state machines . The work at Data General in 1980 used these same devices to design

9409-559: Was present in the audience. In 1965, Gordon Moore, who at the time was working as the director of research and development at Fairchild Semiconductor , was asked to contribute to the thirty-fifth anniversary issue of Electronics magazine with a prediction on the future of the semiconductor components industry over the next ten years. His response was a brief article entitled "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits". Within his editorial, he speculated that by 1975 it would be possible to contain as many as 65 000 components on

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