Book review: Advanced Research in VLSI, edited by Charles L. Seitz (The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1989, 373 pp.)

Reviewed by: Behrooz Parhami Dept. of Electrical & Computer Eng. Univ. of California Santa Barbara, CA 93106 versai" commun ica t i on a rch i tec ture , the simulation is far from efficient if the area is also taken into account. Accordingly, he proposes the not ion of a rea -un iversa l networks, of which his previously proposed "fat-tree" (a tree that can be laid out with polylogarithmic area overhead and that has increasing communica t ion bandwidth between a node and its parent as one gets closer to the root) is an example. An areauniversal network can eff ic ient ly simulate any other network of comparable area, whereas a hypercube would require a r e a that is proportional to the square of A in order to e f f ic ien t ly s imulate an area-A m e s h .