Introduction to VLSI

4.0 credits

Introduction to high performance integrated circuit design. Semiconductor technologies. CMOS inverter. General background on CMOS circuits, ranging from the inverter to more complex logical and sequential circuits. The focus is to provide background and insight into some of the most active high performance related issues in the field of high performance integrated circuit design methodologies, such as CMOS delay and modeling, timing and signal delay analysis, low power CMOS design and analysis, optimal transistor sizing and buffer tapering, pipelining and register allocation, synchronization and clock distribution, retiming, interconnect delay, dynamic CMOS design techniques, power delivery, on-chip regulators, 3-D technology and circuit design, asynchronous vs. synchronous tradeoffs, clock distribution networks, low power design, and CMOS power dissipation.