What is "bacpac"

BACPAC, or the Berkeley Advanced Chip Performance Calculator, is a software program to explore the effect of changes in IC technology. The use enters a set of fairly fundamental properties of the technology (such as interconnect layer thickness, and logic depth) and the program estimates the system level performance of an IC built with these assumptions. Previous work in this area can be found in [1] and [2], but these do not consider many of the effects of deep-sub-micrometre interconnect. BACPAC is based on the work in [3].

BACPAC uses analytical approximations for system properties such as delay and interconnect requirements. The intent is not absolute accuracy for a given design, but to show trends and effects of technology changes.