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CS269: HW/SW Engineering of Embedded Systems, Winter02
The Productivity Gap
•What to do?
–Give up!
•Smaller die, fill chip up with memory…
–Increase Productivity!
•Raise the level of abstraction
•Improvement in design technology
Fortunately, the quality of human brain cell does also improve rapidly.  Through the use of collective knowledge base and CAD tools and methodologies, it shows up as an exponential human productivity growth as well.

I grep this graph straight out of the roadmap.  It shows that while the chip complexity increased historically at 58% per year, designers productivity also grew at a rate of 21% per year.  There remains, however, the very well known, much publicized issue of productivity gap.  As chip complexity grows, more and more designers are required and each to design less and less transistors.  At some point in the near future, the gap will grow so large that throwing more designers into the mix is not going to help much.

So what to do?  There will probably be some elements of giving up, as the die size will probably stay constant or shrink a little while the wafer size increases.  There will also be more on chip memory.  Other than the “easy” solution of  hiring more designers, building smaller die, adding more memory to the chip, improvement in design science can help in the form of better CAD tools and methodology, and by raising the level of abstraction.