VLSI MODELING AND
DESIGN
Dr. Mohammed M. Farag
FACULTY OF ENGINEERING - ALEXANDRIA UNIVERSITY
Course Staff
Instructor:
Mohammed Morsy (mmorsy@[Link])
4th Floor ECE Building
TA:
Eng. Mohamed Megahed
Office hours :
Saturday 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM.
Course Webpage:
[Link]
e/EE432_VLSI_Modeling_and_Design/[Link]
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Course Text
Textbook
“CMOS VLSI Design 4th ed.” Harris, David, and N.
Weste., (2010).
Reference books
“Introduction to VLSI circuits and systems.” Uyemura,
John P. ,(2002).
“Digital integrated circuits 2nd ed.” Rabaey, Jan M.,
Anantha P. Chandrakasan, and Borivoje Nikolic., (2002).
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Course Outline
VLSI Implementation Strategies.
MOSFET non ideal characteristics.
Delay models and logical effort.
Power consumption and low-power design
considerations.
Interconnect modeling, impact, and engineering.
Robustness:Variability, Reliability, and Scaling.
Design Methodologies and Tools.
Testing, Debugging, and Verification.
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Course Work
4 Labs: 20
1 Project: 15
Midterm exam: 15
Final Exam: 75
Tools:
Electric
[Link]
Tanner L-edit [Link]
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About the Lectures
Lectures will make use of slides
Slides are great !
Nice pictures to explain concepts
Good addition for course text
I can annotate them with a tablet PC
I can switch to the tools and listings mid-lecture
Slides are horrible !
They make me teach 30% faster (really)
They give you the sense that this is all easy stuff (it's not)
They make you fall a sleep
They make me lazy
They make me waste time looking for clipart
Slides are a two-edged sword
I encourage you to be active and take notes
I may fall back to blackboard-based teaching occasionally
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History of VLSI
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The Integrated Circuit
1959: Jack Kilby, working at TI, invented a monolithic
“integrated circuit”
Components connected by hand-soldered wires and
isolated by “shaping”, PN-diodes used as resistors (U.S.
Patent 3,138,743)
Figure 0.1 Diagram from patent application
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Integrated Circuits
1961: TI and Fairchild introduced the first logic ICs ($50 in quantity)
1962: RCA developed the first MOS transistor
Figure 0.2 Fairchild bipolar RTL Flip-Flop Figure 0.3 RCA 16-transistor MOSFET IC
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Computer-Aided Design
1967: Fairchild developed the “Micromosaic” IC using CAD
Final layer of interconnect could be customized for different applications
1968: Noyce, Moore left Fairchild, started Intel
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RAMs
1970: Fairchild introduced 256-bit Static RAMs
1970: Intel started selling 1K-bit Dynamic RAMs
Figure 0.4 Fairchild 4100 256-bit SRAM Figure 0.5 Intel 1103 1K-bit DRAM
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The Microprocessor
1971: Intel introduced the 4004
General purpose programmable computer instead of a custom chip for a
Japanese calculator company
Figure 0.6 Intel 4004 Microprocessor
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Moore’s Law and Transistor Count
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Moor’s Law and Frequency
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Introduction
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Outline
Introduction
Complexity and Design
Basic Concepts
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Introduction
IC: Integrated Circuits, many transistors on one chip
VLSI:Very Large Scale Integration, a modern technology
of IC design flow
MOS: Metal-Oxide-Silicon transistor (also called device)
CMOS: Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor
Fast, cheap, low power transistors
High integration, low cost
n-type MOS (nMOS): Majority carriers are Electrons
p-type MOS (pMOS): Majority carriers are Holes
First: How to build your own simple CMOS chip
CMOS transistors
Building logic gates from transistors
Transistor layout and fabrication
Rest of the course: How to build a good CMOS chip!!
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Introduction
The term VLSI is used to collectively refer to many
fields of electrical and computer engineering that
deal with the analysis and design of very dense ICs
A VLSI chip contains more than 106 switching
devices or logic gates
Early in the first decade of the 21st century, the
actual number of transistors has exceeded 108 on a
silicon die of typically 1 cm2 area
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Outline
Introduction
Complexity and Design
Basic Concepts
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Complexity and Design
Creating a design team provides
a realistic approach to
approaching a VLSI project, as it
allows each person to study small
sections of the system
VLSI project needs hundreds of
engineers, scientists, and
technicians
Hierarchy design and many different
“Level Views” help to manage the
complexity
Most work is conducted using
computer-Aided Design (CAD) Figure 1.1 The VLSI design funnel
tools
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Complexity and Design
Design teams provide a realistic approach to develop
a VLSI chip
The design hierarchy enables collaboration between
team members and partitioning the work into a
number of sub-tasks
The chip is viewed at many abstraction levels from
the system specifications to the physical
implementation.
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Design Hierarchy (1/2)
System specifications: is defined in both general
and specific terms, such as functions, speed, size,
etc.
Abstract high-level model: contains information
on the behavior of each block and the
interaction among the blocks in the system
Logic synthesis: To provide the logic design of
the network by specifying the primitive gates
and units needed to build each unit
Circuit design: where transistors are used as
switches and Boolean variables are treated as
vary voltage signal
Physical design: the network is built on a tiny
area on a slice of silicon
Manufacturing: a completed design process is
moved on to the manufacturing line
Figure 1.2 General overview
of the design hierarchy
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Design Hierarchy (2/2)
Hierarchical design
Top-down design
The initial work is quite abstract and theoretical
and there is no direct connection to silicon until
many steps have been completed
Acceptable in modern digital system design
Co-design with combining HW/SW is critical
Similar to Cell-based Design Flow
Bottom-up design
Starts at the silicon or circuit level and builds
primitive units such as logic gates, adders, and
registers as the first steps
Acceptable for small projects
Similar to Full-custom Design Flow
An example of a design hierarchy in Figure
1.3 Figure 1.3 A simple design
flow for a microprocessor
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VLSI Chip Types
At the engineering level, digital VLSI chips are classified by the
approach used to implement and build the circuit
Full-custom Design: where every circuit is custom designed for the
project
Extremely tedious
Time-consuming process
Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs): using an
extensive suite of CAD tools that portray the system design in terms of
standard digital logic constructs
Including state diagrams, functions tables, and logic diagram
Designer does not need any knowledge of the underlying electronics or the
physic of the silicon chip
Major drawback is that all characteristics are set by the architectural design
Semi-custom Design: between that of a full-custom and ASICs
Using a group of primitive predefined cells as building blocks, called cell library
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Outline
Introduction
Complexity and Design
Basic Concepts
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Basic Concepts
VLSI Design is a system design discipline
Many aspects can be taught without any reference to
the underlying silicon circuits
System solutions can be generated using CAD tools
Such an approach hides many details from the
designer
However, many of the most powerful techniques and
ideas of VLSI reside at lower levels
VLSI should be thought as a single discipline that
deals with the conception, design, and manufacture
of complex ICs
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Basic Concepts: Geometrical Patterns
Carver Mead of Caltech pioneered the field
in the 1970’s, a topic that the electronic
integrated circuits could be viewed as a set of
geometrical patterns on the surface of a silicon
chip
Can achieve signal flow and data movement
by tracing the paths of the metallic “lines” that
carried electricity Figure 1.4 Micrograph of a section of
a digital CMOS integrated circuit
Using the repeated patterns and ordered
placement of rectangular lines, polygons, and
groups of geometric patterns
Most modern VLSI technology is based on this
important field
Today, the most powerful topic is System-
on-Chip (SoC) that using bonding pad
technology as Figure 1.5 shows Figure 1.5 Bonding pad
frame for interfacing
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