Why Design Must Change: Rethinking Digital Design -- Prof. Mark Horowitz, Stanford

Design is so expensive we can't afford to spend it on creating a single chip. Working out the interactions in a complex design is challenging and costs a lot of money, even when we do it well. The key is to leverage this work over a broader range of chips -- we need to design chip-generators and not chips. Prof. Horowitz is a professor at Stanford working in the area of digital integrated circuit design. While at Stanford he has led a number of processor designs including: MIPS-X, one of the first processors to include an on-chip instruction cache; Torch, a statically-scheduled, superscalar processor; Flash, a flexible DSM machine; and Smash, a reconfigurable polymorphic manycore processor.