Electrical Engineering 141, 001 - Spring 2010

This course is an introduction to digital integrated circuits. The material will cover CMOS devices and manufacturing technology along with CMOS inverters and gates. Other topics include propagation delay, noise margins, power dissipation, and regenerative logic circuits. We will look at various design styles and architectures as well as the issues that designers must face, such as technology scaling and the impact of interconnect. Examples presented in class include arithmetic circuits, semiconductor memories, and other novel circuits.

The course will start with a detailed description and analysis of the core digital design block, the inverter. Implementations in CMOS will be discussed. Next, the design of more complex combinational gates such as NAND, NOR and EXORs will be discussed, looking at optimizing the speed, area, or power. The learned techniques will be applied on more evolved designs such as adders and multipliers. The influence of interconnect parasitics on circuit performance and approaches to cope with them are treated in detail. Substantial attention will then be devoted to sequential circuits, clocking approaches and memories. The course will be concluded with an examination of design methodologies. CAD Tools for layout, extraction, and simulation will be used for assignments, labs and projects.