Personal-Computer Based Digital and Analog VISI Design Laboratories Wallace B.

Leigh, Division of Electrical Engineering, Alfred University, Alfred, New York, 14802
in technology. Advanced technology has created new problems that are not being considered at the University level. Furthermore, it is difficult to teach all aspects of design in a VLSI couirse where the emphasis is hardware design and physical lalyout. Often the student is forced to learn several different CAD tools in a short time. Thus due to time constraints, several important aspects of design cannot be clovered 2. There are new classes of problems that require analog solutions. These include mixed mode, filtering, telecommunications, (data acquisition, neural modeling, signal and image proc:essing and high-frequency personal communication network applications. In spite of this, analog courses are rarely taught at the undergraduate level. 3. Introduction of a Hardware design language (HDL) or new technologies such as FPGAs often require separate courses in those areas. 4 If follow-up clourses are offered for seniors their last semester, they have graduated and left the institution by the (6 week) time fair MOSISl to complete fabrication. Thus students do not have the albility to test the completed chips. 5 Even if public doimain tools are used, there exists a considerable expense in maintaining the supporting infrastructure. Many VLSI CAD tools only run on a network of UNIX-based walrkstations. Most take considerable disk amd memory space,and often are loaded onto a small network of workstations dedicated to that particular application. Smaller teaching institutions cannot afford the luxury of maintaining a network of workstations for one course, which must also have a technician and/or gr,aduate teaching assistant to help maintain the system. Commercial design tools usually contain an entire Suite of tools, many of which are not used in the VLISI course, and the expense to the University is not justified. 5. In smaller undergraduate-]intensive institutions, no Ph.D. candidate Teaclhing Assistants are available. The instructor for the course has a ilarger teaching load, and teaches their own. labs with only minimal help from teaching assistants. An important consideration in selecting design tools is to select those that are hser friendly, not only to the student but also to the instructor.

Abstract
A goal in the Electrical Engineering Division at Ayred has been to expand the VLSI curriculum to a pyramid of courses structured to teach the students VLSI design f from several aspects. Emphasis o the new VLSI design curriculum is on design methodologies and specific applied design paradigms. The VLSI tools are used solely on personal computers, and the courses are designed so the instructor can teach the laboratories with little or no computer technical assistance. The laboratories are designed so that 1-2 faculty can be used with help from workstudy students. The introductory course is offered to both juniors and seniors. Students taking the course in their junior year have the advantage of more detailed VLSI design experience in their senior year. Expansion of VLSI Design increases the students projkiency in analog design using full custom design and digital design using synthesis tools and Verilog HDL. In the VLSI special topics course, student work as a single group on a design problem and emphasis is on design methodologies, time to market strategies, design for testability and design for Quality.

Introduction There are a few problems with the traditional methods of teaching VLSI design for an institution like Alfred: 1. Although skilled in physical layout, circuit design, MQSFET device physics, and the elements of SPICE simulation, students are often not introduced to design methodology, and are not skilled in partitioning of design, design for testability, i.e. in the proper approach to a design problem. At the industrial level, chips tend to be larger, more complicated and contain a combination of hardware, control and data flow structures, various frequencies and voltages. Digital circuits are mixed with analog. Time to market requirements and increased complexity place increased demands on risk of errors in the design process. At the same time, many smaller firms are not using design synthesis tools due to the expense of these tools, and are still designing on a schematic level. In short, there is a large gap between what is presently being taught and what is presently available via advances

0-8186-7996-4/97 $10.00 0 1997 IEEE

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DeveloDment Plan At Alfred, we started with the design of a VLSI course which does not need workstations for the laboratory[l]. The existing VLSI design course is taught in the Spring semester, and is an example of a technical elective that is offered to both Juniors and seniors. Figure 1 shows the existing structure in prerequisites for the VLSI design course. This system ensures that all prerequisites for VLSI design have been fulfilled. In this scheme, the students, having the core curriculum in digital design and device physics, are free to take the Intro. to VLSI design in Junior year. This leaves the entire senior year open for the VLSI design electives, Analog Design, EED 487, or a special topic. EED 486 Introduction to VLSI Design Originally, the introductory course at Alfred was taught the traditional way. The Weste and Eshraghian[2] book was used. Students did physical layout of VLSI cells using three seats of personal computer based tools.. Recently, this course was significantly altered. The new course differs some from most introductory design courses. The course is split in two parts, and there are two in-class projecst that all students must complete. The first part is an introduction to the methods of VLSI, while the second introduces ASIC digital design methods. Applications are emphasized in each part of the course. At the end, the students then complete individual projects. The course begins with a detailed introduction to
Junior Year Fall Semskr

Senior Year

Analog &sign

Figure 1. M S I cuniculuma AbxI University t

VLSI, the different technologies and reasons for choosing various technologies. The first part of the course is concentrated more on digital design, state machine design and gate-level digital design. Both finite and algorithmic state machines are covered. Supplemental material from the introductory digital logic textbook is used. This is convenient for the student, as it saves from buying an extra textbook, and the course covers material not covered in the introductory digital logic course. Different design methodologies are discussed in the course: top down, bottom up, etc. The students do an inclass project. This project is a specialized parity generator. The project is divided into four parts, and each part is graded separately. For the first part, the design itself is worked out: the Mealy model, the truth tables, and all necessary simplifications are made. After the first part is graded, the design is laid out via schematic capture using PC-based tools. Once the layout is graded and submitted, the design is simulated for design verification and timing. Again the Personal Computer tools are used. The final part is a fault test. In the interest of time, the fault test is included as extra-credit. Four weeks are given for the second project. This part of the course makes for an excellent introduction to advanced digital design synthesis, also part of the proposed curriculum structure. The second part of the course is quite different from the first, as it is a brief introduction to Verilog HDL, and a second in-class project is done; again the parity generator. This design is simulated using PC software available to the student, and is routed this time to FPGAs for design verification. Besides the projects, homework is assigned that is designed to familiarize students with the software tools. The two-part nature of the introductory course fits well both with the structure of the textbook, as well as that of the design tools, and makes for an excellent introductory course for the two subsequent courses. For the final four weeks of the course, the students do a special project. They are free to choose any project that the Instructor improves of, although most do projects from a list of five hroven projects. These include the following projects: 1)vending machine controller, 2)combination lock, 3)intelligent traffic controller, 4)control logic for an elevator in an 8 story building, 5)digital logic driver for a Thunderbird taillight, including cyclops brake light. Students are steered towards projects the professor feels meets their abilities, and most are able to finish in the time allotted. Special projects are again laid out using PC-based schematic capture software, simulated and fault tested, and when completed are placed and routed. Graduating

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Seniors in the course are given the option of design using Verilog, or schematic capture of designs to be routed to FPGAs. Finished individual projects are submitted to MOSIS for fabrication. Students have the option of taking an incomplete for the course, then receiving an X if they follow up fabrication by testing their completed circuits and issuing a short report on the outcome. The option to the incomplete is to be graded on the projects and homework. No tests nor final are given in the course. Analog Design. EED487 Details of VLSI physical layout, including Device physics, fabrication, and SPICE extraction and simulation, are covered in the Analog design course. This course is of similar structure to an Analog course developed by Robert Caverly at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Details of this course can be found in Ref. [3]. Laboratories for the course at Alfred include the following: 1. Simple two-transistor inverting amplifier. 2. Two transistor current mirror. 3. Nine transistor operational amplifier 4. Single pole switched capacitor filter. Design includes tutorials , and testing of circuits. Textbook for the course is currently Geiger, et a1.[4] Again the PC-based layout tools are used. A student edition of the layout editor and SPICE simulator is used. EED 484 Special Topics in VLSI Finally, students having both courses are allowed to take EED 484-Special topics in VLSI Design. This course is designed to bring together all of the techniques learned in the previous VLSI courses, into a special project course that would be modeled from industry. This allows larger projects, with students working as a team instead of as individual groups. FPGAs and custom designs are used, with the same software. Emphasis is on design methodology, time to market strategies, and managing the complexity of design. A typical project for this course would be one combining digital and analog techniques learned from previous courses. An obvious choice for a project would be one based on Digital Signal Processing @SP) applications. However, a DSP project chip in VLSI is usually only offered at the graduate level, due to the advanced nature of the topic. An example is a course sequence for graduate students outlined by Parhi[5] which involve pre-requisites in both a DSP course as well as a VLSI course. Such a DSP course for undergraduates has been described by Nagurney[6] but no mention was made on an analog VLSI component of that curriculum.

A design project is needed that would be more appropriate for undergraduates: something that can be completed in one semester, that would include both a digital and anallog componlent with an option of combining a more refined 1)SP component for later generations of the project. For this proposal we have chosen as an initial project a switched capacitor filter for a capacitive or resistive sensor, that samples data and converts it to pulse width moldulation (PWM) form for digital processing. Several such projects have been described in the literature[7,8]. For the laboratory, the students will complete an entire design cycle, with logic simulations, test-bed programming and place and route for full custom chips to be fabricated by MOSIS. Design for quality and design for testability will be emphasized. Suitable textbook would be Ergovac and Lang[9] or Armstrong and Gray[101. References 1 W. B. Leigh, Personal Computer Based VLSI Design Curriculum, Proceedings ofthe IEEE Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI, Buffalo, N.Y. 1995 p250.
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N. S. E. Weste and K. Eshraghdan, Principles of CMOS VLSI Design, 2nd Ed, Addison,-Wesley,(1993).

R. H. Caverly, A Laboratory-Oriented Approach to Undergraduate Analog CMOS VLSI Design Instruction, 1994 ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings, p 2628 (1994)

R. Geiger, P. Allen, and N. Strader, VLSI Design, Techniques for Analog and Digital Circuits. New VLSI ~curriculum K. K. Parhi, VLSI Digital Signal Processing Education, A silomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers 2, (2) p1303 (1994).
L. S. Nagurney Personal and Wireless Communications and the BSEE Curriculum, 1 9 95 Frontiers in Education Conference paper 4a5.1. (1995) 7H. Acker, S. Schwehr, M. Hauck, T. Persch, J. Vollrath, Proceedings Euro ASIC 92 CNIT, Paris June 1-5 (1992) p 326
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Y. Cao and G. C. Temes, m International i Symposium on Circuits and Systems p 1848 (1995).
8

M.D. Ercegovac and T. Lang, 13igital Systems and HardwareFinnware Algorithms, Wiley and sons, 1985.
OJ. Armstrong and f. G. Gray, jjtnictured Logic Design with VHDL, EnglewoodClifs,Prentice-Hall 1993.

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