Introduction to VLSI Systems: A Logic, Circuit, and System Perspective

Book Preface

With the advance of semiconductors and the prosperous computer, consumer, as well as communication industries, the use of system-on-a-chip (SoC) has become an essential technique to reduce product cost. With this progress and continuous reduction of feature sizes, it becomes very important to understand the fundamentals of circuit and layout designs of very large-scale integration (VLSI) circuits due to the following reasons at least. First, addressing the harder problems requires fundamental understanding of circuit and layout design issues. Second, distinguished engineers can often develop their physical intuition to estimate the behavior of circuits rapidly without relying predominantly on computer-aided design (CAD) tools. This book addresses the need for teaching such a topic in terms of a logic, circuit, and system design perspective.

To achieve the above-mentioned goals, this book will focus on building an understanding of integrated circuits from the bottom up and pay much attention to both logic circuit and layout designs in addition to system designs. More precisely, this book has the following objectives. First, it is to familiarize the reader with the process of implementing a digital system as a full-custom integrated circuit. Second, it covers the principle of switch logic design and provides useful paradigms, which may apply to various static and dynamic logic families. Third, it concretely copes with the fabrication and layout designs of complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) VLSI. Hence, the reader will be able to design a VLSI system with the full-custom skill after reading this book. Fourth, it intends to cover the important issues of modern CMOS processes, including deep submicron devices, circuit optimization, interconnect modeling and optimization, signal integrity, power integrity, clocking and timing, power dissipation, and electrostatic discharge (ESD). As a consequence, the reader not only can comprehensively understand the features and limitations of modern VLSI technologies but also have enough background to adapt himself to this ever-changing eld.

The contents of this book stem largely from the courses VLSI System Designs” and Digital Integrated Circuits Analysis and Design,” oered yearly at our campus over the past fteen years. Both are elective courses for the undergraduate and rst-year graduate. This book, Introduction to VLSI: A Logic, Circuit, and System Perspective, is intended to be useful both as a text for students and as a reference book for practicing engineers or a self-study book for readers. For classroom use, an abundance of examples are provided throughout the book for helping readers understand the basic features of full-custom VLSI and grasp the essentials of digital logic designs, digital circuit analysis and design, and system design issues as well. In addition, a lot of gures are used to illustrate the theme concepts of the topics. Abundant review questions are also included in each chapter for helping readers test their understanding of the context.