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Heavy demand for high performance computer chips

Staff Reporter

Technical meet examines emerging design trends

Coimbatore : Consumers prefer high performance computer chips that consume low power and which are priced at affordable rates, said V. Visvanathan, Chief Technologist, Texas Instruments, Bangalore, here on Friday.

Mr. Visvanathan was inaugurating the 2nd National Conference on `Emerging Trends in VLSI Design,' organised by the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering of PSG College of Technology.

Electronic components had been getting progressively smaller and much thinner than a human hair, he said. Engineers now had to deal with tiny devices that had to be designed so that they functioned correctly from the beginning. Wrong designing that failed to produce the expected results gave competitors an advantage.

Designers needed

"A chip is only as good as the software that runs on it," he observed. Technology had made it possible to place as many as 1.8 billion transistors on a chip but designing tiny devices to take advantage of the technical possibilities required "large numbers of very smart engineers and designers."

Another factor was that smaller chips made it more difficult to manage power delivery and heat dissipation.

Consumers wanted portable devices to perform an increasing number of complicated activities, causing designers to take into account the need to minimise power consumption and leakage.

Moreover, when the design of computer devices became complex, performance might begin to vary widely from the expected levels.

Fault tolerance

Designers would have to pay greater attention to fault tolerance and redundancy in computer chips, especially those using very large scale integration (VLSI).

S. Subramanian, Principal, Sri Krishna College of Engineering and Technology, presided over the conference.

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