CSCE 612: VLSI System Design

Instructor: Jason D. Bakos

VLSI Design
What is VLSI?
Very Large Scale Integration Defines integration level 1980s hold-over from outdated taxonomy for integration levels
Obviously influenced from frequency bands, i.e. HF, VHF, UHF

Sources disagree on what is measured (gates or transistors?)

SSI Small-Scale Integration (0-102) MSI Medium-Scale Integration (102-103) LSI Large-Scale Integration (103-105) VLSI Very Large-Scale Integration (105-107) ULSI Ultra Large-Scale Integration (>=107)

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Integration Level Trends

Obligatory historical Moores law plot

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Integrated Circuits/MEMs
Today, VLSI refers to systems impl. w/integrated circuits
Integrated circuit refers mostly to general manufacturing technique
micro/nano-scale devices on a semiconductor (crystalline) substrate Formed using chemical/lithography processing

What kind of devices / structures?

transistors (bipolar, MOSFET) wires (interconnects and passives) diodes (junction, LEDs, VCSELs, MSM, photoconductor, PiN) MEMs (piezoelectric integration, accelerometers, gyroscopes, pressure sensors, micro-mirrors)

For CMOS digital design, we only use MOSFET transistors (used as switches) and wires

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Chips
Integrated circuits consist of:
A small square or rectangular die, < 1mm thick
Small die: 1.5 mm x 1.5 mm => 2.25 mm2 Large die: 15 mm x 15 mm => 225 mm2

Larger die sizes mean:

More logic, memory Less volume Less yield

Dies are made from silicon (substrate)

Substrate provides mechanical support and electrical common point

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VLSI Design
Draw polygons that represent layers deposited on the substrate
More of an art than science

Scale: approximately 10 um x 10 um

One 2-input NAND gate with 4 transistors Typical microprocessor contains 50 200 million transistors (10-50 million gates)
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VLSI Design
Manual layout design is obviously not practical Design complexity:
Manually drawing layout for a billion transistors would take too long Even if we could
How to verify (test) designs for functionality, speed, power, etc.?
Complexity scales faster than actual design

How to reuse designs? How to create human-readable designs? How to speed-up design process?

These problems form a great deal of work

Electronic Design Automation (EDA) a.k.a. CAD

Advancing EDA technology, physical fabrication technology, advanced designs, and IP form bulk of work (and money) in VLSI

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EDA Tools
Conclusion:
This course is about using design tools to manage design complexity of VLSI systems Only way to learn tools: practice and work with tools individually Must teach IC fundamentals, but prevent course from becoming semiconductor theory, analog electronics, circuits, or digital logic course
Target large-scale integration and EDA Reach good balance between fundamental IC theory and automated largescale design methodology

80-90% of course time will be spent in lab

Tutorials will provide basic knowledge Must learn the tools on your own (assisted by instructor)
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Course Overview
This course is called VLSI System Design Focus on large-scale system design (CAD tools) CAD tools manage design and verification complexity What we have
Latest, most advanced CAD tools in the EDA industry Three primary players
Synopsys, #258 ($1.2 billion revenue) Cadence Design Systems, #259 ($1.1 billion revenue) Mentor Graphics, ? Comparison: Microsoft #95 ($36.8 billion), Intel #102 ($34.2 billion)

Fabrication award for 500 nm CMOS fabrication process

AMI C5N process with academic design kit (NCSU CDK) 1.5 mm x 1.5 mm die size, multiple dies, packaging VLSI System Design 9

EDA Tools
Big companies, lots of money, 40 years of integrated circuit design experience, conferences, journals, powerful PCs whats the problem? IC CAD tools are difficult to use
Written by electrical engineers (not professional programmers) Incredibly buggy Not documented Rely on ancient, outdated file formats for interoperability Still mostly rely on command-line interfaces Utilize outdated, primitive, buggy APIs for GUIs Inherently required to solve hard problems
Place components, route wires Must utilize advanced heuristics that are only as good as fabrication process technology information and user input (garbage-in, garbage-out)

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EDA Tools
Cadence tools
IC-Tools => IC5141 package (Linux) Collection of tools managed by Design Framework II (dfII)
Virtuoso schematic/layout editor Analog Environment Spectre simulator Diva DRC, EXT, LVS

Other Cadence tools

SignalStorm => TSI42 package (Linux) Abstract Generator => DSMSE54 (Solaris) First Encounter => SOC42 package (Linux)

Synopsys
Design Compiler (Linux)

Mentor
HDL Designer (Linux)

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What EDA Tools Can Do

Manual layout vs. EDA is like:
Manual transmission vs. automatic transmission HTML programming vs. Frontpage Assembly code programming vs. compiled high-level language

Manual layout for small, optimized designs will always be superior EDA techniques for larger-scale designs will always be superior (verification, reusability, NRE, etc.) Goal: do careful, manual design of smaller components (cells) and use EDA to combine them for large-scale design
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What EDA Tools Can Do

My Design Flow
Circuit Sim Digital cell library design Cadence IC-Tools Cadence IC-Tools Abstract Generation Cadence AbGen Characterization Cadence SignalStorm
char. info process info, cell abstracts

Design Specification Behavioral VHDL Design Mentor HDL Designer

VHDL

Standard Cell Library Synthesis Synopsys Design Analyzer

Verilog

Place-and-Route Cadence First Encounter Interconnect Timing Simulation Mentor ModelSim VLSI System Design 13

Behavioral Simulation Mentor ModelSim

Cell Timing Simulation Mentor ModelSim

Course Organization
Course will be divided into units
Introduction: IC design and fabrication fundamentals
Lectures Assignments from textbook

VHDL Design
Lectures on VHDL Tutorial: Mentor HDL Designer Design project Tutorial: Synopsys Design Analyzer Tutorial: Cadence First Encounter Teams? Design? Fabrication?

CMOS circuit design, layout, and simulation

Tutorial: Cadence IC-Tools Design projects Development of standard cell library

Logic Synthesis

Place-and-route Course project

Cell library development

Tutorial: Cadence SignalStorm and Abstract Generator Report on cell library

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