What is GSI?
GSI stands for Gigascale Integration. Throughout the past 50 years, silicon microelectronics has advanced at an utterly unprecedented exponential rate in both productivity and performance. The number of transistors per chip has increased by about seven orders of magnitude while the price range of a chip has remained virtually constant, and the switching energy per binary transition has decreased by about five decades. This advancement has been made possible by Gigascale Integration, implying continued technology scaling, improved transistor performance to increase frequency, increased integration capacity to realize complex architectures, and reduced energy consumed per logic operation to keep power dissipation within limit. This technology will enable integration capacity of billions of transistors at Gigahertz clock frequencies, or GGSI. What is the importance of GSI? A compelling question facing the rapidly growing 100 billion dollar world-wide semiconductor industry is: “How much l
