Goal:

VLSI is very important to the information, communication, and electronic industry, which together account for 50% of the exporting business of Taiwan. Every CS or EE student should be knowledgeable about VLSI Design. The course is basically a simplified version of CS5120, which has been offered to about 40 graduate students each year over the past 9 years.

The objective of this course is to give undergraduate students (junior & senior) a basic understanding of what is VLSI all about. Students completing this course shall be able to know both the possibility and limitation of implementing a digital system on a chip. Therefore, they will be better prepared for future study on anything that requires a hardware implementation.

Contents:

Text:

  1. Wayne Wolf, "Modern VLSI Design -- A Systems Approach," Prentice Hall, 1994.

Reference:

  1. Neil H. E. Weste and Kamran Eshraghian, "Principles of CMOS VLSI Design -- A Systems Perspective," 2nd ed., Addison-Wesley, 1993.
  2. W. Maly, "Atlas of IC Technologies: An Introduction to VLSI Processes," Benjamin-Cummings, 1987.
  3. Dar-Zen Chung, "VLSI Fabrication Technologies," (in Chinese), Gao-Li Publishers, 1995.
  4. Yu-Chin Hsu, Kevin F. Tsai, Jessie T. Liu, and Eric S. Lin, "VHDL Modeling for Digital Design Synthesis," Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995.
  5. Eli Sternheim, Rajvir Singh, Rajeev Madhavan and Yatin Trivedi, "Digital Design and Synthesis with Verilog HDL," Automata Publishing Company, 1993.
  6. Handouts

Grade:

  1. Homework -- 30%
  2. Midterm -- 20%
  3. Final -- 20%
  4. Project -- 20%

Term Project:

Students will do a cell-based design project starting from HDL language description all the way down to the fabricatable layout.