Abstract: Techniques are described for semiconductor chips with reduced capacitive power dissipation as a result of improved conductor line spacing. The approaches are particularly applicable to 0.25 micron chip design processes and below. According to one aspect, where there are n available metallization layers available to the designer, a smaller number of layers, such as n-1, are utilized initially in developing a routing design. Then, at least one further metallization layer is used to systematically route conductors, such as bus conductors, to increase the number of metal pitches between conductors, by promoting conductors from one layer to another.

Abstract: An indirect VLIW (iVLIW) architecture is described which contains a minimum of two instruction memories. The first instruction memory (SIM) contains short-instruction-words (SIWs) of a fixed length. The second instruction memory (VIM), contains very-long-instruction-words (VLIWs) which allow execution of multiple instructions in parallel. Each SIW may be fetched and executed as an independent instruction by one of the available execution units. A special class of SIW is used to reference the VIM indirectly to either execute or load a specified VLIW instruction (called an “XV” instruction for “eXecute VLIW”, or LV for “Load VLIW”). In these cases, the SIW instruction specifies how the location of the VLIW is to be accessed. Other aspects of this approach relate to the application of data memory addressing techniques for execution or loading of VLIWs that parallel the addressing modes used for data memory accesses.