As the benefits of traditional technology scaling, like Dennard Scaling and Moore’s Law, slow significantly, computer architecture is poised to enter a golden age of innovation. Domain-specific architecture (DSA) is a promising solution to continue improving computing performance, while maintaining the level of energy efficiency previously found in technology scaling. Unfortunately, traditional methodologies of chip design and hardware development have created significant barriers, requiring extremely high non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs in tools, labor, IPs, etc., ultimately prohibiting the wide adoption of DSA.
In contrast, the significant engineering costs and extremely long design cycles of software have shrunk significantly over the past decades due to the proliferation of open-source software and the use of agile software development techniques. Small teams of software developers can now realize their innovative ideas quickly. Inspired by these results from the software community, agile and open hardware design is considered to be one of the most promising ways to lower the design cost of chip design, although there are still many challenges in abstraction, methodologies, and tools. This special issue of IEEE Micro will explore academic and industrial research on topics that relate to agile chip design and open-source hardware. Such topics include, but are not limited to:
Please see the Author Information page and the Magazine Peer Review page for more information. Please submit electronically through ScholarOne Manuscripts (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cs-ieee), selecting this special-issue option.
Contact guest editors Yungang Bao and Trevor E. Carlson at micro4-20@computer.org or the editor-in-chief Lizy John at ljohn@ece.utexas.edu.
