Digital Integrated Circuit Design and Architecture

3 units

This is a project-oriented course on digital VLSI design. The course material focuses on bottom-up design of digital integrated circuits, starting from CMOS transistors, CMOS inverters, combinational circuits and sequential logic designs. Important design aspects of digital integrated circuits such as propagation delay, noise margins and power dissipation are covered in the class, and design challenges in sub-micron technology are addressed. The students design combinational and sequential circuits at various levels of abstraction using a state-of-the-art CAD environment provided by Cadence Design Systems. The goal of the course is to design a microprocessor in 0.5 micron technology that will be fabricated by a semiconductor foundry.