Digital VLSI System Design - 525.658

An introductory course in digital VLSI design in which students design digital CMOS integrated circuits and systems. The class covers transistor, behavioral, and physical level design using a variety of design tools, including transistor level circuit layout and simulation, logic simulation and synthesis with Verilog HDL, and automated placement and routing. Students will learn the fundamentals of CMOS technology and fabrication, as well as apply that knowledge to current challenges in process scaling and manufacturing. The course will use this foundation as a basis for understanding the operation and design of static CMOS inverters, as well as more complicated combinational logic gates and sequential circuits. Subsequently, more complicated functional blocks such as adders, multipliers, and memory arrays are summarized and integrated into designs at higher levels of abstraction using Verilog HDL and highly automated logic synthesis, placement, and routing tools. The class culminates in a final project in which each student designs a more complicated digital system from architecture to final layout. Prerequisite(s): Courses in digital design and circuit design fundamentals (Kirchoff’s laws and circuit analysis). Helpful, but not required, is experience in HDL based design, transistor level design, and using Linux-based systems.