Abstract—A 600-MHz VLIWdigital signal processor (DSP) de- livers 4800 MIPS, 2400 (16 b) or 4800 (8 b) million multiply ac- cumulates (MMACs) at 0.3 mW/MMAC (16 b). The chip has 64M transistors and dissipates 718 mW at 600 MHz and 1.2 V, and 200 mWat 300MHZ and 0.9 V. It has an eight-way VLIWDSP core, a two-level memory system, and an I/O bandwidth of 2.4 GB/s. The chip integrates a c64X DSP core with Viterbi and turbo decoders. Architectural and circuit design approaches to achieve high perfor- mance and low power using a semi-custom standard cell method- ology, while maintaining backward compatibility, are described. The chip is implemented in a 0.13- m CMOS process with six layers of copper interconnect.