CSE 460: VLSI Design

TA N V I R A H M E D
L E C T U R E R , D E P T. O F C S E , B R A C U
E M A I L : TA N V I R . A H M E D @ B R A C U . A C . B D
Rubrics
You will be graded on the following criteria (yet to be finalized):
 Attendance
 Quizzes
 Assignments
 Software assignments
 Midterm
 Final
Contents
 Introduction to VLSI, History, Timeline
 Digital logic design review, Logic gates and sequential circuit elements
 CMOS Circuit design, fabrication, characterization
 Combinational and sequential circuit design using CMOS
 Finite State Machines (FSM)
 Introduction to Verilog (a hardware description language)
 CMOS DC response, Power and Delay analysis
 Memory element design
 Complete VLSI flow (from silicon to chip)
Text & References
# Title Author(s) Edition
1. CMOS VLSI Design N.H.E. Weste, D. Harris & A. Banerjee 4th ed.
2. Fundamentals of Digital Logic with Stephen Brown & Zvonko Vranesic 2nd/3rd ed.
Verilog Design
Introduction
 Integrated circuits (IC): many transistors on one chip
 Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI): bucket-loads! Integration Levels
 Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor SSI: 1-12 gates
Fast, cheap, low power transistors MSI: 13-99 gates
 Today: How to build your own simple CMOS chip LSI: 100-9999 gates
CMOS transistors
Building logic gates from transistors VLSI: 10-99.9 k gates
Transistor layout and fabrication ULSI: >100k gates
 Rest of the course: How to build a good CMOS chip
Fabrication
The process through which a Silicon wafer becomes a chip/IC
A Brief History
1958: FIRST INTEGRATED CIRCUIT 2010:
Flip-flop using two transistors Intel Core i7 microprocessor 2.3 billion
Built by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments transistors
64 Gb Flash memory: > 16 billion
transistors
Invention of the Transistor
Vacuum tubes ruled in first half of 20th century
 Large, expensive, power-hungry, unreliable
1947: first point contact transistor
Transistor types
 Bipolar Junction Transistors
 2 types of carriers are used for conduction (holes & electrons)
 n-p-n or p-n-p structure
 Small current into very thin base layer controls large currents between emitter and
collector
 Field Effect Transistors
 Unipolar
 JFET, MOSFET, FinFET are some of the most common FETs
 Voltage applied to insulated gate controls current between source and drain
 Low power allows very high integration
How do Transistors look irl?

Reference: https://randomnerdtutorials.com/electronics-basics-how-a-transistor-works/
MOSFET Schematic
Transistor symbols
CMOS vs FinFET (2D vs 3D Transistor)
MOS Integrated Circuits
 1970’s usually had only n-MOS transistors: Inexpensive, but consume power while idle

Intel 1101 256-bit SRAM Intel 4004 4-bit mProc

 1980s-present: CMOS processes for low idle power

Moore’s law
 1965: Gordon Moore plotted transistor on each chip
 Fit straight line on semi-log scale
 Transistor counts have doubled about every 2 years
 Then vs. up to 2000s
Feature Size
Feature size, f = distance between source and drain

Minimum feature

size shrinking 30%

every 2-3 years

Design Abstraction