Spring 2005 Seminar Series

DATE: Thursday, May 12, 2005
LOCATION: E40-298
TIME: 4:15pm
Reception immediately following in the Philip M. Morse Reading Room, E40-106

SPEAKER:
Bernhard Korte
Professor or Operations Research and Discrete Mathematics
University of Bonn

TITLE
Mathematics of VLSI Chip Design

ABSTRACT
Modern very-large-scale integrated (VLSI) logic-chips are indeed the most complex structures, which human beings have invented and produced. The development of complexity of these electronic midgets goes ahead with breathtaking speed. It can be stated with great satisfaction that methods of discrete optimization play an important role in this subject area. Moreover, certain aspects of the design of microprocessors cannot be solved without mathematical optimization methods. These discrete optimization problems appear in dimensions far beyond our human scale and imagination. It is absolutely impossible to imagine that on a modern chip about 500,000 transistors have space under this dot "." and that on an area of a thumbnail about 1.5 kilometers of interconnections can be routed. Optimization methods for placement, routing, timing, transistor- and wire-sizing, buffer-insertion, power minimization, and clocktree construction are absolutely necessary to design a complex microprocessor. In this talk we will focus on a few very recent topics in this challenging area.