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If the
design challenges facing LSI engineers in the 1970s could be likened to
designing a large city--laying out its streets, utilities, planning its
districts. The design challenges of
today are on the order of designing a city that covers a gas giant such as
Jupiter. Indeed, such a task is so
enormous that I do not know of a single instance where every circuit in a
chip is unique. In our day, we consume
much of the die area using repeated structures: memories, TCAMs, etc. The remainder is largely filled using
automated synthesis.
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