Center for Circuit System Solutions

Welcome

The Center for Circuit & System Solutions (C2S2), a consortium of university researchers, was formed to address the circuit design challenges of semiconductor scaling as it reaches its physical limits. Chartered by the US semiconductor industry and US government, C2S2 is one of six research centers funded under the Focus Center Research Program of the Semiconductor Research Corporation.

Five prominent challenges represent C2S2’s mission:

• The End of the CMOS Roadmap. Difficult physics, unreliability, statistical extremes, cost-of-design and -fab challenge us to sustain further scaling.
• Unexploitable Maximum Performance. Risk and cost of design forces more products to utilize unspecialized hardware solutions.
• Opportunities Beyond Information Technology (IT). Must now look beyond Moore's Law to huge commercial and defense opportunities.
• Design Strategies for Nondigital Circuits/Modules. Nondigital designs based on unstructured, ad hoc design flows are increasingly unaffordable.
• Post-Silicon Circuits. While (almost) a reality, must be deployed in circuits to actively assist post-silicon device progress.

Research focus

C2S2 will invent the radical new circuit/module concepts needed to convert novel devices into robust performance across a wide range of commercial and defense applications by:

• Targeting end-of-roadmap silicon, diverse More-than-Moore technologies, and promising post-Si devices.
• Developing novel circuit design technologies, without consideration of boundaries that once stood between digital and nondigital modules.
• Investing in tools/flows to dramatically improve design productivity for application-speciific digital systems, and for what was previously an ad hoc nondigital design process.

To achieve these research objectives, the Center is organized into the following 5 Themes: