Design Automation for Integrated Circuit Systems

3 units

Integrated circuit systems provide the core technology that power today's most advanced devices and electronics: smart phones, wearable devices, autonomous robots, and cars, aerospace or medical electronics. These systems often consist of silicon microchips made up by billions of transistors and contain various components such as microprocessors, DSPs, hardware accelerators, memories, and I/O interfaces, therefore design automation is critical to tackle the design complexity at the system level. The objectives of this course is to 1) introduce transistor-level analysis of basic digital logic circuits; 2) provide a general understanding of hardware description language (HDL) and design automation tools for very large scale integrated (VLSI) systems; 3) expose students to the design automation techniques used in the best-known academic and commercial systems. Topics covered include device and circuits for digital logic circuits, digital IC design flow, logic synthesis, physical design, circuit simulation and optimization, timing analysis, power delivery network analysis. Assignments include homework, mini-projects, term paper and group project.