Digital Hardware Platforms

Since the invention of the integrated circuit in the 1950s, there has been explosive developments of electronic circuits. Over the last decades, the amount of transistors, which are the fundamental elements of digital and analog circuits, fitting on a single silicon die has increased exponentially, from a few thousands to billions to date. This trend was already observed in 1965 [15] by Intel’s co-founder Gordon E. Moore and later came to be known as “Moore’s law” coined by Carver Mead. Moore’s law has held true since then and is a driving force of the advancements of Very-large-scale integration (VLSI) design [11].