introduction

Welcome to 02205 VLSI Design

This is a course for graduate students (MS students), and it is lectured in English. It is offered during the spring term by DTU Compute at the Technical University of Denmark.

Nowadays, chips like the nVIDIA GTX285 (shown in the picture) contain more than a billion of devices and are capable of computing more than a million of a million (10¹²) of operations per second. On the other hand, the GTX285 chip can dissipate up to 160 Watts. Think of the heat generated by a 150 W light-bulb, in the GTX285 chip, it is concentrated in an area of about 4 square cm!

This example shows the challenges engineers face in designing such chips.

In this course, we will address a number of these challenges: from the technology which enabled the microelectronics revolution, to the design methodology and tools necessary to build such complex systems, to the strategies to keep the power dissipation - and the heat - to a reasonable level, to the reliability issues deriving by the aggressive device miniaturization.

The course includes some practical exercises, run in the lab, to learn to use state-of-the-art design tools and to apply the methodologies to design a System-on-Chip.

The topics covered in the course can be categorized as belonging to three tracks:

Technology Design Methodology System Perspective

CMOS TECHNOLOGY

CMOS process
Static CMOS gates
Timing and power dissipation
Variations and reliability

TECHNOLOGY SCALING

Device and wire scaling

MEMORY

Static and Dynamic RAM
Flash memory

DESIGN FLOW

Levels of abstraction
Design flow for ASICs and FPGAs
Design tasks:

Simulation
Synthesis
Place&Route

DESIGN FOR LOW-POWER

High-level (algorithm) techniques
RT-level techniques
Gate-level techniques
WIRE ENGINEERING

Clock

Synchronization
Clock distribution

Power network

Power distribution
Power domains

CHIPS AND BOARDS

Packaging
Heat removal
Signal integrity

Technology	Design Methodology	System Perspective
CMOS TECHNOLOGY CMOS process Static CMOS gates Timing and power dissipation Variations and reliability TECHNOLOGY SCALING Device and wire scaling MEMORY Static and Dynamic RAM Flash memory	DESIGN FLOW Levels of abstraction Design flow for ASICs and FPGAs Design tasks: Simulation Synthesis Place&Route DESIGN FOR LOW-POWER High-level (algorithm) techniques RT-level techniques Gate-level techniques	WIRE ENGINEERING Clock Synchronization Clock distribution Power network Power distribution Power domains CHIPS AND BOARDS Packaging Heat removal Signal integrity

To better follow this course, you should be familiar with the fundamentals of design of digital systems and know a hardware description language, such as VHDL.