VLSI TECHNOLOGY AND

DESIGN
• Electronics industry has achieved a phenomenal growth
over last few decades due to rapid advances in integration
technologies and large scale systems design.
• Use of integrated circuits in high performance computing,
telecommunications and consumer electronics has been
growing at a very fast pace .
• More and more complex functions required in data
processing and telecommunication devices , need to
integrate these functions increase.
• VLSI term used even for ULSI category.
• Monolithic integration provides :
• Less area /volume and compactness
• Less power consumption
• Less testing requirements at system level
• Higher reliability due to on chip inter connects
• Higher speed due to significantly reduced
interconnection length
• Significant cost savings
 VLSI Design
• VLSI technology has been successfully used to
build microprocessors , Signal processors, large
capacity memories, memory controllers, I/O
controllers and interconnection networks
• Integrated circuits of above complexity would not
have been possible without the assistance of
computer programs during all phases of the design
process.
• These computer programs automate most of the
design process
• Designing a VLSI chip with the help of computer
programs is known as CAD.
• For LSI and VLSI domains, it is important to
simulate the behaviour of a circuit before the circuit
has been manufactured.
• For VLSI technology , it is not very important to
save on transistors, the cost reduction through logic
minimization is unlikely to be significant when the
total number of transistors is in order of a million.
• It is important to save on inter connection costs,
Since wires are far more expensive in VLSI than
transistors.
 VLSI Design Process :
• In order to reduce complexity of design
process, several intermediate levels of
abstractions are introduced.
 Idea

Architectural Design

Logical Design

Physical Design

Fabrication

New Chip
• A human engineer can easily think in terms of
larger circuit modules such as arithmetic units,
memory units, inter connection networks and
controllers. Designing a circuit at this level of
abstraction is known as Architectural Design
• Architectural Design done by expert human
engineers.
• Decisions made at this stage affect the cost
and performance of the design significantly.
• Decisions made during the architectural design of a
microprocessor :
• What should be the instruction set ?
• What memory addressing modes should be
supported ?
• Should it be compatible with another
microprocessor available in the market ?
• Should pipelining be employed ?
• What should be the depth ?
• Should the processor be provided with an on-chip
cache ?size ?
• Should the arithmetic unit be designed as a bit-serial
unit or a bit-parallel unit
• How will the processor interface to the
external world ?
• Architectural design can not be done entirely
by a computer program.
• Computer programs can aid the system
architect through simulation.
• Once the system architecture is defined , two
things are necessary :
• Detailed logic design of individual circuit
modules.
• Derive the control signals necessary to activate
and de-activate the circuit modules.
• First step is known as Data path design
• Second step is called Control path design
• Data path of a circuit includes various
functional blocks, storage elements and
hardware components to allow transfer of
data among functional blocks and storage
elements.
• Control path of a circuit generates various
control signals necessary to operate the
circuit.
 Logic Design
• The data path and control path (derived automatically
or manually) will have components such as ALU,
Shift registers, Multiplexers, Buffers and so on.
• Circuit implemented on a VLSI chip using
predesigned circuit components from a module
library.
• Predesigned modules are known as macro cells.
• Cells must be placed on the layout surface and wired
together using metal and polysilicon inter-
connection.
 Physical Design
• This stage precedes the fabrication of a circuit.
• Physical design refers to all synthesis steps
succeeding logic design and preceding fabrication.
• Design includes all or some of the steps :
• Logic partitioning
• Floor planning –chip and component geometries
• Placement – arranging circuit components
• Routing – precisely defining paths on layout
surface on which conductors carrying electrical
signals are run
• There are two components to the area of an IC.
• The Functional area
• The Wiring area
• Area taken up by active elements in
the circuit is functional area (Full
adder, Register, Mux, D.F.F. etc.)
• Wires used to interconnect functional
modules constitutes the wiring area.
• Effect of layout (placement and routing) on
the timing performance of a circuit.
• Metal and poly silicon are used to connect
two points that are electrically equivalent.
• Metal and poly lines introduce wiring
impedances.
• Wire can impede a signal from traveling at a
fast speed.
• Longer the wire , larger the impedance and
longer the delays.
 Layout styles :
• Various layout approaches to generate
physical representation of circuits.
• These approaches differ mainly in the
structural constraints they impose on layout
elements as well as layout surface.
Two general classes
[1] Full custom layout where layout elements
are handcrafted and can be placed anywhere
on the layout surface
[2] Semi custom approach which impose
some structure on layout elements and
surface.
Few examples of layout styles :
(i) Full custom
(ii) Gate array Design
(iii)Standard cell design
(iv)Macro cell
(v) PLA
(vi)FPGA
 Full custom layout
• Manual layout design
• Time consuming and difficult
• Gives full control to designer in placing circuit
blocks and interconnecting them.
• Expert can achieve high degree of optimization in
both area and performance.
• These approach takes several man months to layout
a VLSI chip manually.
• It is used for mass production (Microprocessor)
 Gate array layout
• Consists of a large number of transistors
which have been pre-fabricated on a
wafer in the form of regular two
dimensional array.
 Standard cell layout
• Is a logic block that performs a standard
function.
• Two input NAND , two input XOR Gate, D-
Flip-Flop,Two input multiplexer and so on.
• Cell library has a collection of information
like name , functionality, pin structure and
layout
 Macro cell layout
• Design style which permits cells to very in
both dimensions is called macro cell design
style.
• Advantage is that cells of significant
complexity are permitted in library
• Register , Register files, ALU, Memories can
be accommodated in the library.
 PLA
• Two level sum of product expressions
• It consists of an AND plane to implement
the product terms and an OR plane to
implement the sums.
• Fixed architecture
• Can be used for combinational and sequential
circuits
 FPGA layout
• Consists of two dimensional array of logic
blocks
• Each block can be programmed to implement
any logic function of inputs.
• Interconnects contain programmable switches
that serve to connect the logic blocks to the
wire segments or one wire segment to another.
 Difficulties in Physical design
• Physical design is a complex optimization problem.
• Good layout is one which occupies minimum area, uses
short wires for interconnection.
• Layout must meet all constraints posed by specification.
• No single computer program is possible to deal with
physical design problem.
• Different approaches required for different layout styles.