Digital VLSI Design Automation

Prologue:

As the CMOS technology follow Moore's law of scaling, it brings a number of challenges in realizing a design to an end-user product. Along with the technology scaling a need for the complex systems has also been growing due to a dream of making the devices a smart and intelligent one. Therefore, such demand (its a genuine demand) has called for a design automation approach to the VLSI design flow. The electronic design automation (EDA) has got two primary goals: reducing the design time and to minimize the design errors as much as possible. Since last two decades all the industry have been using the EDA based design methodology. It has been envisioned that in the very near future the EDA tools would be a fully autonomous one that would tape-out the design without much of human intervention in the design cycle.

Course description:

Realizing a design using the automation tool or designing a new set of automation tools demands that the designer (VLSI designer) or tool designer/developer be very much through in the foundation of VLSI design automation. The foundation of VLSI design automation would consists of two subjects: the VLSI design which comes from the background of Digital Logic Design and CMOS VLSI Technology, and the second subject is Design Automation. The Design Automation is primarily the subjects that deals with programming, data structure, and algorithm. Therefore, this is a unique course which provides a learning on how to specify and represent a digital circuit such that the design can be realized using computer before it goes for physical realization. The ability to abstract, map, and optimize the design will be taught in this course. A student of this course would be capable of doing two things: to be able to use the EDA tools to meet the design requirements and to be able to identify the limitations of current practice and develop a new tool set.

Pre-requisite:

  • Digital Logic Design or Digital System Design
  • Data Structure and Algorithm
  • Programming Language (C/C++)

    • PS: A very similar content that are being offered with different course title around the world could be found as CAD for VLSI, Electronics Design Automation, High-level Synthesis and something similar to these.