Generator-based integrated-circuit design flows are crucial for meeting the aggressive system-on-chip development timelines demanded by rapidly changing modern workloads. Generators allow chip designers to develop complex solutions to classes of problems rather than individual instances, allowing significant design changes late in the development cycle and enabling incremental improvements to existing solutions. The philosophies of welcoming changing requirements and steady, incremental development have been embraced by the software development community for some time, but have only recently been incorporated into hardware development. While this adoption of proven software development philosophies has decreased the turnaround time of systems-on-chip, productivity has been limited by hard-to-automate tasks like physical design. Each generated design instance requires a new human-generated floorplan or other changes to the physical design flow, limiting the throughput of design space exploration by the available engineering resources. Automation of physical design is therefore critical for state-of-the-art generator-based system-on-chip design.

This work describes a series of generator-based integrated circuits manufactured in 28nm FD-SOI and 16nm FinFET, outlines the physical design challenges encountered in their development, and presents a physical design methodology purpose-built to solve these challenges. The integrated circuits presented include an 8192-point digital spectrometer in 28nm FD-SOI, a dual-core RISC-V vector processor with on-chip fine-grain power management in 28nm FD-SOI, a dual-lane RISC-V vector processor with a dedicated on-chip power management core in 28nm FD-SOI, an eight-core RISC-V vector machine in 16nm FinFET, and a 21-core RISC-V vector machine with a systolic array accelerator in 16nm FinFET. The eight-core chip achieves a state-of-the-art energy efficiency of 209.5 GFLOPS/W on a half-precision matrix multiplication (GEMM) kernel.

The physical design methodology presented uses a framework, Hammer, to provide reusable physical design deliverables by decoupling the design-specific, tool-specific, and technology-specific aspects of back-end design along with a novel floorplan generation framework for Chisel designs. This physical design methodology has been incorporated into the Chipyard framework, an open-source RISC-V system-on-chip development platform leveraging the Chisel hardware construction language. The floorplan generation framework allows Chisel programs, which generate RTL, to specify composable floorplans without modifying the original source code. The flow solves common challenges associated with floorplanning generated RTL, such as SRAM mapping and placement, demonstrating the efficacy of floorplan generation in reducing the overhead and cycle times of generator-based design.