IC Design using VLSI

Integrated circuit design, or IC design, is a subset of electronics engineering, encompassing the particular logic and circuit design techniques required to design integrated circuits, or ICs. ICs consist of miniaturized electronic components built into an electrical network on a monolithic semiconductor substrate by photolithography.C design can be divided into the broad categories of digital and analog IC design. Digital IC design is to produce components such as microprocessors, FPGAs, memories (RAM, ROM, and flash) and digital ASICs. Digital design focuses on logical correctness, maximizing circuit density, and placing circuits so that clock and timing signals are routed efficiently. Analog IC design also has specializations in power IC design and RF IC design. Analog IC design is used in the design of op-amps, linear regulators, phase locked loops, oscillators and active filters.

Modern ICs are enormously complicated. An average desktop computer chip, as of 2015, has over 1 billion transistors. The rules for what can and cannot be manufactured are also extremely complex. Common IC processes of 2015 have more than 500 rules. Furthermore, since the manufacturing process itself is not completely predictable, designers must account for its statistical nature. The complexity of modern IC design, as well as market pressure to produce designs rapidly, has led to the extensive use of automated design tools in the IC design process. In short, the design of an IC using EDA software is the design, test, and verification of the instructions that the IC is to carry out

What's the course about

VLSI Digital & System Design

Very-large-scale integration (VLSI) is the process of creating an integrated circuit (IC) by combining thousands of transistors into a single chip. In other words, an IC has many transistors on one chip, while VLSI has very many transistors on one chip. A modern VLSI chip is a complex beast with billions of transistors, millions of logic gates deployed for computation and control.

Engineers manage to design these complicated chips by making use of computer aided design (CAD) tools that take an abstract description of the chip, and refines it step-wise to a final design. Designing a VLSI chip involves steps like logic synthesis, timing analysis, floor planning, placement and routing, verification, and testing.

VLSI System Verilog

VLSI systems are designed using hardware description languages (HDLs). There are three types of HDLs: VHDL, Verilog, and System Verilog. VHDL and Verilog are considered a general-purpose digital design language, and System Verilog is an enhanced version of Verilog.

These HDLs are not software programming languages but the ones that describe propagation time and signal strengths - in short the behavior of electronic circuits or products. System Verilog combines HDLs and a hardware verification language. It takes an object-oriented programming approach.

Course objectives

The course aims to provide students a thorough understanding of the fundamental concepts and design of VLSI systems. It teaches digital circuit design process, design methodologies of VLSI systems, various concepts of VLSI systems such as MOS transistors, and digital CMOS logic designs.

Students will learn how to develop architecture using industry standard tools, design digital circuits, as well as verification of large scale designs. They will get a direct and inclusive treatment of VLSI design processes and rules of designs.

The course deals with PSpice netlist creation, circuit simulation, analysis and design validation of analogue, digital and mixed signal circuits and with design optimization techniques. It trains students to analyze and explore circuit performance and functional relationships with "what if" scenarios and simulate complex mixed-signal designs.

System Verilog combines HDLs and a hardware verification language. It takes an object-oriented programming approach. It also teaches how to code in system Verilog language-which is the most popular Hardware description language used for SoC design and verification in semiconductor industry.

Key course content

VLSI Digital & System Design

Introduction to Digital Circuit Design

Linux Commands

Switch, Structural, Data Flow, Gate level and Behavioral Modeling.

Gate delays and Strength Levels

Test Bench Creation

Design Compilation ,Elaboration, & Simulation

Terminal and GUI mode simulation

ALU Design and Verification

Combinational UDP and Sequential UDP

Design Verification using FPGA

VLSI System VerilogrCAD PCB Editor

Pre-defined and User defined data types

Array types (Static, dynamic, associative)

OOPs programming concepts (Eg: Class, Inheritance)

Constrained random stimulus generation

Casting (Static & dynamic)

SV Schedulers

Inter Process communication (Semaphore, mailbox)

Coverage Analysis (Code, Functional, FSM)

Interfaces and clocking block

Test bench creation using system Verilog concepts

Who can enroll

All electrical, electronics and IT hardware design students and those who aspire to become digital system designers. A graduation in the respective fields is preferrable.

Electrical and electronics students, IT students, and anyone with a background of C or C++ or any Object-Oriented programming language can enroll for the program.

Job opportunities

Students can get jobs at companies manufacturing semiconductors, electronic products and IT hardware like motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers, integrated circuits, flash memory, graphics chips, embedded processors. Some of the job titles are: Silicon Architecture Engineer, Digital Design Engineer, IC Design Engineer, Component Design Engineer, Hardware Design Engineer and VLSI Engineer.