Google Ramps Up Chip Design EETIMES
effort in developing its own chips. Just what it is designing is
still unclear.
At a panel at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference
(ISSCC), veteran venture capitalist John Doerr said, "at some
point in time Facebook will work on proprietary silicon, I know
for a fact Google is."
The same day, another veteran chip designer at ISSCC told EE Times
he knows at least two or three circuit designers Google has hired
over the last year or so.
A key engineer behind the Hewlett-Packard Moonshoot server moved
to Google six months ago. Partha Ranganathan "is currently at
Google designing their next-generation systems," according to his
website. He worked at HP on systems that can accommodate a wide
range of Xeon, Atom, and ARM processors.
Google is exploring whether or not to design its own ARM server
chip, according to a Bloomberg report from December based on a
single source. The search giant has not made a decision on the
project yet, the report said, noting a job posting for a hardware
engineer updated in December.
More evidence of Google's intentions can be found on its online
job postings.
Google updated on January 28 an opening for an "ASIC top level
design engineer." The person is responsible for "creation and
delivery of top-level RTL for ASIC and SOC projects."
A separate posting updated January 20 listed an opening for a CAD
engineer to "lead the overall IC, ASIC, and/or Chip CAD platforms
for multiple design projects." The engineer will support custom
EDA flows and install third-party IP blocks and design kits.
The job postings suggest Google may be fairly early on in
establishing a deep and broad semiconductor design capability. The
postings all include the following boilerplate text making it
clear the chip design efforts are for Google's datacenter systems:
Our computational challenges are so big, complex and unique we
can't just purchase off-the-shelf hardware, we've got to make it
ourselves. Your team designs and builds the hardware, software and
networking technologies that power all of Google's services. You
develop from the lowest levels of circuit design to large system
design and see those systems all the way through to high volume
manufacturing.
文中的Partha Ranganathan是顶级牛人，ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award获得
者。其Server/CPU设计方面相关著作是搞这一行必读的。
Maurice Wilkes Award是计算机体系结构界的崇高荣誉。
http://www.sigarch.org/awards/acm-sigarch-maurice-wilkes-award
历史上获得Maurice Wilkes Award工业界人士有：
http://www.sigarch.org/awards/acm-sigarch-maurice-wilkes-award-past-
winners
2013 – Parthasarathy (Partha) Ranganathan
本文中提到的人物。
For contributions to the design of power-efficient microblade servers and
pioneering work in disaggregated system designs.
2003 – Dirk Meyer
AMD的上一任CEO，CPU设计殿堂级人物，AMD K8的主要设计者。
For significant architectural contributions to Alpha and X86 processor
designs.
2002 – Glenn Hinton
Intel的Fellow，Pentium 4的Chief Architect。
For the Pentium 4 microprocessor design and other contributions to the
field of microarchitecture.
2000 – William J. Dally
Nvidia的现Chief Scientist。
For contributions in the design of multiprocessor interconnection
networks and parallel computer architectures.
鄙司已经有人去google做芯片方面的director了。
这个是系统架构方面的，和一般的ic设计其实关系没那么大吧。还是适合计算机搞系统的人吧。
搞架构的老师最喜欢招IC出身的了
很多问题不是说写个C就结束了，写完C仅仅是开始，而且C也illustrate不了什么
写SystemC总算和RTL贴近了不少，但是招个RTL熟悉的人，写出的SC也更贴近硬件