Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1295812
24 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I OCTOBER 2020 Feature Interview by the I-Connect007 Editorial Team José E. Schutt-Ainé is an electrical and com- puter engineering professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a contribu- tor to the Heterogeneous Integration Roadmap (HIR). In this conversation, José gives Nolan Johnson and Andy Shaughnessy an overview of the co-design chapter he co-authored in the HIR, the motivations behind advances in co- design, and why designers are the real drivers who must decide what is needed in EDA tools to facilitate the process of co-design. Nolan Johnson: José, start by telling us what chapter of the HIR you were involved with. José Schutt-Ainé: I was involved with Chapter 13, which is the co-design chapter, and that is supposed to be an extension of the modeling and simulation chapter. Initially, the co-design effort was part of the modeling and simulation, but we decided that in the context of hetero- geneous integration, it had to be taken sepa- rately. We look into the traditional methods that have been in use for co-design. We need to think about what's going to happen in the next 10–20 years and how co-design will affect future types of designs like neuromorphic computers or quantum computing, etc. We start with the traditional co-design methods, and we discuss what the challenges are. Co-design involves putting together different types of simulation tools. Placement and routing are very differ- ent than electromagnetic instruction, which is very different from circuit simulation. How do you get these tools to talk to each other in optimizing a design? We also look at the domains, the chip, package, and board. How do they coexist? How do you transmit information from one domain to the other in a seamless manner? And how is it done tradi- tionally? We looked at that, and then this led to pathfinding, which is considered as the ulti- mate method for doing co-design. Pathfinding not only optimizes the design itself, but it also looks at other considerations, such as cost and performance. We had a section devoted to that. We also looked at the impact of co-design and architecture. How do you want to design your How Designers Can Help Facilitate Co-Design