The goals of architecture design

VLSI architecture design is concerned with deciding on the necessary hardware resources for solving problems from data and/or signal processing and with organizing their interplay in such a way as to meet target specifications defined by marketing.

The foremost concern is to get the desired functionality right. The second priority is to meet some given performance target, often expressed in terms of data throughput or operation rate. A third objective, of economic nature this time, is to minimize production costs. Assuming a given fabrication process, this implies minimizing circuit size and maximizing fabrication yield so as to obtain as many functioning parts per processed wafer as possible.

Another general concern in VLSI design is energy efficiency. Battery-operated equipment, such as hand-held cellular phones, laptop computers, digital hearing aids, etc., obviously imposes stringent limits on the acceptable power consumption. It is perhaps less evident that energy efficiency is also of interest when power gets supplied from the mains. The reason for this is the cost of removing the heat generated by high-performance high-density ICs. While the VLSI designer is challenged to meet a given performance figure at minimum power in the former case, maximizing performance within a limited power budget is what is sought in the latter.

The ability to change from one mode of operation to another in very little time, and the flexibility to accommodate evolving needs and/or to upgrade to future standards are other highly desirable qualities and subsumed here under the term agility.