What Is CPU design?

CPU design refers to the engineering of the central processing unit (CPU), which is a part of computer hardware (design). It is a branch of computer engineering and electrical engineering.

Developing a new, high-end CPU is a costly proposition. For example, the average annual salary of a computer engineer is about $ 250,000. ^[1] This includes wages, benefits, CAD tools, computers, office space rent, etc. Assuming 100 engineers are required to design the CPU, the project will take 4 years.

Total expenditure = $ 250,000 / engines / year x 100 engineers x 4 years = $ 100 million.

The above amount is just an example. The design team of modern general-purpose CPUs has hundreds of team members.

CPU architecture design embedded processor economy

The largest shipment of embedded CPU series is 8051, with an average of nearly 1 billion units per year. 8051 is widely used because it is very cheap. Design time is now roughly zero because it is widely used as a commercial intellectual property. Now it is usually embedded as a small part of a larger system on a chip. The cost of silicon for the 8051 is now as low as $ 0.001 because some implementations use as few as 2,200 logic gates, while the number of wafers is 0.0127 mm2.

As of 2009, the number of CPUs generated using the ARM architecture instruction set exceeded the other 32-bit instruction sets. The design of the ARM architecture and the first ARM chip takes approximately one and a half years and five years of work.

The 32-bit Parallax Propeller microcontroller architecture and the first chip were designed by two people during approximately 10 years of work.

The 8-bit AVR architecture and the first AVR microcontroller were conceived and designed by two students at the Norwegian Institute of Technology.

The 8-bit 6502 architecture and the first MOS technology 6502 chip were designed by about 9 people in 13 months.

CPU CPU Architecture Design Research and Education

The 32-bit Berkeley RISCI and RISC II architecture and the first chips were designed primarily by a series of students as part of a fourth-quarter graduate course sequence. This design became the basis for commercial SPARC processor designs.

About ten years later, each student taking MIT's 6.004 course is part of a team-each team has a semester to design and build a simple 8-bit CPU in a 7400 series integrated circuit. A team of 4 students designed and built a simple 32-bit CPU during the semester.

Some undergraduate courses require a team of 2 to 5 students to design, implement, and test a simple CPU in an FPGA during a 15-week semester.

The MultiTitan CPU was designed over 2.5 years of hard work and was considered "relatively little design work" at the time. 24 people participated in the 3.5-year MultiTitan research project, which included designing and building prototype CPUs.

CPU architecture design soft microprocessor core

For embedded systems, the highest performance level is usually not needed or required due to power requirements. This allows the use of processors that can be implemented entirely by logic synthesis techniques. These integrated processors can be implemented in a shorter period of time, thereby reducing time to market.