VLSI Design Short Course

With the exponential growth of electronics and its deployment in almost all aspects of our life (portable devices, medical devices, security, communication, transportation, space, etc.), it is important for engineers working with these devices to understand and comprehend the basic principle of digital electronic circuits.

The goal of this course is to give the student a good understanding of how CMOS-based digital system is designed. The emphasis will be on the circuit design aspect of the system.

Learning Outcomes

Attendees will understand the following topics:

• Main steps involved in the fabrication of CMOS VLSI systems, Discover the structure and operation of MOS transistors, impact of small geometry and variation on device performance.
• Design and evaluate combinational and sequential logic circuits.
• Examine digital circuit design and tradeoffs for power, performance (frequency), and area.
• Analyze digital memory circuits, periphery logic, and memory hierarchy.
• Describe the testing of VLSI digital circuit and its impact on quality, and cost.
• Describe Emerging Electronics Technology and the role it may play on the next computing paradigm.

Students, researchers, and industry personnel who would like to learn about the hardware that runs all our devices focusing on digital circuit design (VLSI). Background in basic circuit design and analysis, digital logic, and computer architecture will be helpful.

CMOS Technology and Basic Device Structure

• It all starts from grains of sand

Combinational Circuits (Transistor Level Design)

• Static CMOS Gates NAND, NOR, Complex Gates AOI
• Transmission and Tri-state Gate
• Combinational Block - Multiplexer, Decoder, Adder, and Comparator

Sequential Circuittatic Latch

• Flip-Flop
• Pulse-Latch

Timing Analysis

• Maximum Frequency
• Clock Skew and Clock Jitter

Power Analysis

• Static Power
• Active Power

Power, Performance, Area (PPA) Tradeoffs

CMOS Memory

• SRAM, DRAM, Flash Basic Principle and Cell Design
• Memory Organization, Periphery Circuit, Memory Hierarchy (L1, L2 Caches...)

VLSI Testing

• Stuck at Fault
• Built-In Self-Test (BIST)

Emerging Technology: Beyond CMOS (RRAM, In-memory Computing)

CMOS Layout

• Stick Diagram
• Layout Generation and Analysis

Note: This is a 5-day course. Three full days will be allotted for theoretical discussion and another two full days for the practical hands-on part.