EE721 Digital and mixed-signal VLSI Design

Instructor

Steve Bibyk's Office CL381, Office Hours: MWF 3:30-4:30pm and by email appointment.
bibyk@ece.ohio-state.edu

Exam 1: Fri. May 2 One open book
Exam 2: Wed. May 28 One open book

TA

John Hu Office CL372, Office Hour: tbd

ECE721 Sheets

  • Design Flow
  • Cadence IC Component Design Flow
  • IC Design Project Flow
  • System Design
  • System Design & Language

    • Miscellaneous - Design and Project Guides

    ECE721 Book Links

    The third edition of our textbook is a major revision, although the second edition is fine to use.
    Some of the new chapters are online at: Weste and Harris, 3rd ed.
    Plenty of course material and many useful links from Prof. D. Harris' web site are online at: Author's course website
    from 2nd ed. ece721 textbook

    The next book site is for a textbook we could switch to someday, it also has a large amount of online content.
    Digital ICs by J. Rabaey et al It's the textbook used at the Univ. of Virginia site below.
    Here are some pertinent comments in the 1st edition Preface Top Down vs. Bottom Up
    Here are a few key slides from his Chp. 1 ppt slides (online) Intro Chapter points

    Intel Research Technology.
    Find the VLSI Circuit ones, such as in the Microprocessors and Silicon Areas. Intel Silicon Technology.

    Project CAD Tools

    Setup Cadence See Cadence Tool setup, NCSU ver 1.2. Note item 5, the upgrades to the Mentor Graphics link.
    You will need CAD tools for the project. For tutorials on how to use Cadence, see the section on Tutorials on the Setup webpage.
    A specific tutorial from SJSU on custom digital IC project for telephony is given here SJSU IC Engineer Tutorial

    The Cadence tools have a huge set of help files ( > 177MB ) which can be accessed either within tools or directly in the doc directory
    (eg. /opt/local/cadence/IC5033/doc...). Here is an example helpfile file for Virtuoso Composer Schematic entry: Schematic Entry

    Various CAD tools are listed at the following MOSIS link. Electric is free and a decent overall package.
    Full Custom CAD tools
    Another free sent of tools for large digital ASIC design flows is at: Alliance tools
    One of the main difficulties with CAD tools, especially free ones, are the lack of design kits and libraries
    for MOSIS type IC fabrication processes. That's one of the reasons we use a Cadence design flow.

    Univ. of Virginia (Prof. Mircea Stan) - Cadence Tutorials

    Using Cadence for Project work

    CAD tool use for chip design

    One goal of the project work is to get familiar with design flows for chip design. In design, it is helpful to know how
    to interact with the chip fabrication and testing companies. In EE721, group chip design projects
    may send out a chip design for fabrication.

    A good source for how to deal with chip fabrication companies (foundries) is at: Mosis Chip fabrication broker
    The site map at this link shows the scope of know-how that is needed: Mosis site map

    This Mosis link Mosis Technical Note lists design content for the AMI process, some of the library docs are listed next:
    AMI 0.5um Padframe Library , AMI 0.5um Design Library
    Both of these libraries can be studied via the cadence tools by defining a link from the library name (in your cds.lib file) to:
    /opt/local/cadence/design_kits/NCSU/current/local/lib/Pads_lib_ami06
    /opt/local/cadence/design_kits/NCSU/current/local/lib/Digital_lib_ami06
    Your defined library name should be the same as the library.
    If you would like to see the OSU_diglib_ami06 cell library used for digital synthesis, substitute "beta" for "current" in the above path links.

    Univ. of Tenn. AMI 0.5um Design Libraries and VLSI (Cadence) content

    Virginia Tech TSMC Design Libraries for digital synthesis

    For pure digital only design, the vast majority of design flows of interest to us would capture and
    test the design in an FPGA first, and then port to a digital ASIC. There are a variety of kits FPGA Development kits
    for FPGA design flows, and the cost of verifying the digital system design is over 100x lower.
    A good source of established designs (in FPGAs) for processor cores are at: Open Core web site and
    Free Cores link site (Germany)
    Some project groups could look into porting a core to ASIC.
    Here is a 3 pg. doc on bit slice ALU approach using programmable pass transistor function blocks Schematic, Overview, Layout

    PROJECT INFORMATION

    Automating Digital Design in Mixed Signal Systems James Copus' Digital Synthesis Thesis

    Commercial Cell Library

    Project Topics are discussed in Class. Here is a partial list of Project Options:

    An example topics from the past is: Asynchronous Logic Circuits
    An example final report from last time is: Past Report on Wavelet ASIC Note the tips in the conclusion.
    Here is a MidWest Circuits Conference paper that came from an EE721 project. EEProm Conference Paper , Midwest Circuits & System Conference
    Here is a paper that came from OSU VLSI chip design research. Vampire Video Chip Paper
    Here is a nice link to memory design considerations CMU memory course , Memory Compiler Tutorial