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| Acronym/Jargon | Means | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Abstraction | The process of purposefully neglecting finer details of a design (abstracting them away). This is a key concept for chip designers, as we are often working with very large designs. Trying to consider every little detail of a design would quickly become impossible due to the complexity (ex. trying to consider the exact implementation of an OR gate in a large processor). Instead, we often abstract away certain details, depending on where we're working. For example, if I'm working with an SRAM, I might only consider the interface (which address I'm reading from, and the read/write data) as a functional-level model, instead of trying to simulate every SRAM block. This can help reduce the complexity, making it much easier for us to work with designs, as well as for our tools to simulate/manage them. | |
| Abutment | A quality of electrical connections on IC's. Specifically, two nets are connected "by abutment" if there connection occurs simply from touching each other when being placed on the cell, and require no further routing. Think of your computer charger; there's no routing that goes into it, but it's connected to your computer simply by being pressed up against it. | |
| Accelerator | A piece of hardware meant to accelerate a specific task. This is useful when you know that you are likely to be performing a specific task over and over again, and wish to have dedicated hardware to perform it. For example, if you are designing a chip to go in a car, you might have an A* algorithm accelerator to speed up the computation of calculating the shortest route to a destination. Many designs also have accelerators coupled with general-purpose hardware. This allows for general computations, but adding the option to use the accelerator when beneficial. | |
| ADC | Analog-Digital Converter | A piece of hardware that converts an analog signal (with a continuous spectrum of values) to a digital signal (with discrete values). It is one of the projects for the Analog subteam '23-'24 |
| Antenna Violation | An antenna violation is when you have a large trace of metal on your chip (which we call the antenna). During fabrication (specifically etching), this can result in a large buildup of charge on the wire, leading to damage to any gates they're connected to (see Section 3.6.1 of CMOS VLSI Design). This is usually solved with jumper or diode insertion. | |
| Architecture | The overall high-level design of a system, indicating how it will complete its tasks. For example, most processors are examples of von Neumann architecture | |
| ARM | Advanced RISC Machines | A family of RISC ISAs (or the company that licenses them, originally known as Acorn Computers, with their first major success being their revolutionary BBC Micro as a personal computer). It is the most widely used family of ISAs at time of writing, with use being dominant in mobile devices, as well as in Apple Silicon machines. |
| ASIC | Application-Specific Integrated Circuit | A custom IC targeted towards a specific purpose (different from a more general-purpose component). It will aim to perform a specific workload better than a general-purpose alternative, either in terms or area, energy, power, and/or cost. |
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