Digital Integrated Circuits

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by: Jan M. Rabaey, Anantha Chandrakasan, Borivoje Nikolic

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Progressive in content and form, this practical text successfully bridges the gap between the circuit perspective and system perspective of digital integrated circuit design. Beginning with solid discussions on the operation of electronic devices and and in-depth analysis of the nucleus of digital design, the text maintains a consistent, logical flow of subject matter throughout, addressing today's most significant and compelling industry topics: the impact of interconnect, design for low power, issues in timing and clocking, design methodologies, and the tremendous effect of design automation on the digital design perspective.

Since the publication of the first edition of this book in 1996, CMOS manufacturing technology has continued its breathtaking pace, scaling to ever-smaller dimensions. Minimum feature sizes are now reaching the 100-rim realm. Circuits are becoming more complex, challenging the productivity of the designer, while the plunge into the deep-submicron space causes devices to behave differently and brings to the forefront a number of new issues that impact the reliability, cost, performance, power dissipation, and reliability of the digital IC. This updated text reflects the ongoing (r)evolution in the world of digital integrated circuit design, caused by this move into the deep-submicron realm. This means increased importance of deep-submicron transistor effects, interconnect, signal integrity, high-performance and low-power design, timing, and clock distribution. In contrast to the first edition, the present text focuses entirely on CMOS ICs.

Even more than for the first edition, this book uses its companion website to evolve and grow over time. It contains complete Microsoft PowerPoint presentations covering all the material, updates. corrections, design projects, and extensive instructor material. Most importantly, all problem sets are now available on the website (and have been removed from the text).

* It focuses solely on deep-submicron CMOS devices, the workhorses of today's digital integrated circuits. A simple transistor model for manual analysis, called the unified MOS model, has been developed and is used throughout. * Design Examples stress the design of Digital ICs from a real-world perspective. Design challenges and guidelines are highlighted. 0.25-micron CMOS technology is used for all the examples and problems. * Design Methodology inserts are interspersed throughout the text, highlighting the importance of methodology and tools in today's design process. * A Perspective section at the end of each chapter gives an insight into future evolutions.

Reviews:

What is New? Welcome to second edition of "Digital Integrated Circuits: A Design Perspective." In the six years since the publication of the first, the field of digital integrated circuits has gone through some dramatic evolutions and changes. IC manufacturing technology has continued to scale to ever-smaller dimensions. Minimum feature sizes have scaled by a factor of almost ten since the writing of the first edition, and now are approaching the 100 nm realm. This scaling has a double impact on the design of digital integrated circuit. First of all, the complexity of the designs that can be put on a single die has increased dramatically. Dealing with the challenges this poses has led to new design methodologies and implementation strategies. At the same time, the plunge into the deep-submicron space causes devices to behave differently, and brings to the forefront a number of new issues that impact the reliability, cost, performance, and power dissipation of the digital IC. Addressing these issues in-depth is what differentiates this edition from the first. A glance through the table of contents reveals extended coverage of issues such as deep-sub micron devices, circuit optimization, interconnect modeling and optimization, signal integrity, clocking and timing, and power dissipation. All these topics are illustrated with state-of-the-art design examples. Also, since MOS now represents more than 99% of the digital IC market, older technologies such as silicon bipolar and GaAs have been deleted (however, the interested reader can find the old chapters on these technologies on the web site of the book). Given the importance of methodology in today's design process, we have included Design Methodology Inserts throughout the text, each of which highlights one particular aspect of the design process. This new edition represents a major reworking of the book. The biggest change is the addition of two co-authors, Anantha and Bora, who have brought a broader insight into digital IC design and its latest trends and challenges. Maintaining the Spirit of the First Edition While introducing these changes, our intent has been to preserve the spirit and goals of the first edition-that is, to bridge the gap between the circuit and system visions on digital design. While starting from a solid understanding of the operation of electronic devices and an in-depth analysis of the nucleus of digital design-the inverter-we gradually channel this knowledge into the design of more complex modules such as gates, registers, controllers, adders, multipliers, and memories. We identify the compelling questions facing the designers of today's complex circuits: What are the dominant design parameters, what section of the design should he focus on and what details could she ignore? Simplification is clearly the only approach to address the increasing complexity of the digital systems. However, oversimplification can lead to circuit failure since global circuit effects such as timing, interconnect, and power consumption are ignored. To avoid this pitfall it is important to design digital circuits with both a circuits and a systems perspective in mind. This is the approach taken in this book, which brings the reader the knowledge and expertise needed to deal with complexity, using both analytical and experimental techniques. How to Use This Book The core of the text is intended for use in a senior-level digital circuit design class. Around this kernel, we have included chapters and sections covering the more advanced topics. In the course of developing this book, it quickly became obvious that it is difficult to define a subset of the digital circuit design domain that covers everyone's needs. On the one hand, a newcomer to the field needs detailed coverage of the basic concepts. On the other hand, feedback from early readers and reviewers indicated that an in-depth and extensive coverage of advanced topics and current issues is desirable and necessary. Providing this complete vision resulted in a text that exceeds the scope of a single-semester class. The more advanced material can be used as the basis for a graduate class. The wide coverage and the inclusion of state-of-the-art topics also makes the text useful as a reference work for professional engineers. It is assumed that students taking this course are familiar with the basics of logic design. The organization of the material is such that the chapters can be taught or read in many ways, as long as a number of precedence relations are adhered to. The core of the text consists of Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8. Chapters 1 to 4 can be considered as introductory. In response to popular demand, we have introduced a short treatise on semiconductor manufacturing in Chapter 2. Students with 4 prior introduction to semiconductor devices can traverse quickly .through Chapter 3. We urge everyone to do at least that, as a number of important notations and foundations are introduced in that chapter. In addition, an original approach to the modeling of deep-submicron transistors enabling manual analysis, is introduced. To emphasize the importance of interconnect in today's digital design, we have moved the modeling of interconnect forward in the text to Chapter 4. Chapters 9 to 12 are of a more advanced nature and can be used to provide a certain focus to the course. A course with a focus on the circuit aspects, for example, can supplement the core material with Chapters 9 and 12. A course focused on the digital system design should consider adding (parts of) Chapters 9, 10, and 11. All of these advanced chapters can be used to form the core of a graduate or a follow-on course. Sections considered advanced are marked with an asterisk in the text. A number of possible paths through the material for a senior-level class are enumerated below. In the instructor documentation, provided on the book's web site, we have included a number of complete syllabi based on courses run at some academic institutions. Basic circuit class (with minor prior device knowledge): 1, 2.1-3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, (9.1-9.3, 12). Somewhat more advanced circuit coverage: 1, (2, 3), 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.1-10.3, 10.5-10.6, 12. Course with systems focus: 1, (2, 3), 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.1-10.4, 11, 12.1-12.2. The design methodology inserts are, by preference, covered in concurrence with the chapter to which they are attached.

In order to maintain a consistent flow through each of the chapters, the topics are introduced first, followed by a detailed and in-depth discussion of the ideas. A Perspective section discusses how the introduced concepts relate to real world designs and how they might be impacted by future evolutions. Each chapter finishes with a Summary, which briefly enumerates the topics covered in the text, followed by To Probe Further and Reference sections. These provide ample references and pointers for a reader interested in further details on some of the material.

As the title of the book implies, one of the goals of this book is to stress the design aspect of digital circuits. To achieve this more practical viewpoint and to provide a real perspective, we have interspersed actual design examples and layouts throughout the text. These case studies help to answer questions, such as "How much area or speed or power is really saved by applying this technique?" To mimic the real design process, we are making extensive use of design tools such as circuit- and switch-level simulation as well as layout editing and extraction. Computer analysis is used throughout to verify manual results, to illustrate new concepts, or to examine complex behavior beyond the reach of manual analysis.

Finally, to facilitate the learning process, there are numerous examples included in the text. Each chapter contains a number of problems or brain-teasers (answers for which can be found in the back of the book), that provoke thinking and understanding while reading.

The Worldwide Web Companion

A worldwide web companion (http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/IcBook/index.htm) provides fully worked-out design problems and a complete set of overhead transparencies, extracting the most important figures and graphs from the text.

In contrast to the first edition, we have chosen NOT to include problems sets and design problems in the text. Instead we decided to make them available on the book's web site. This gives us the opportunity to dynamically upgrade and extend the problems, providing a more effective tool for the instructor. More than 300 challenging exercises are currently provided. The goal is to provide the individual reader an independent gauge for his understanding of the material and to provide practice in the use of some of the design tools. Each problem is keyed to the text sections it refers to (e.g., <1.3>), the design tools that must be used when solving the problem (e.g., SPICE) and a rating, ranking the problems on difficulty: (E) easy, (M) moderate, and (C) challenging. Problems marked with a (D) include a design or research elements. Solutions to the problem sets are available only to instructors of academic institutions that have chosen to adopt our book for classroom use. They are available through the publisher on a password-protected web site.

Open-ended design problems help to gain the all-important insight into design optimization and trade-off. The use of design editing, verification and analysis tools is recommended when attempting these design problems. Fully worked out versions of these problems can be found on the web site.

In addition, the book's web site also offers samples of hardware and software laboratories, extra background information, and useful links.

This book is a must have for everyone planning to or currently designing vlsi high performance circuits. Covers initials/reviews of mos transistors from mid-to-deep physics to simple components and then to further more complicated circuits. Interesting to mention that the authors compile a set of related articles published on highly respected journals. Cons are that many times those coverage are superficial, condensed to one page and leads you to deeper research on the original references. Pros are that you have, in only one place, a whole compilation of good articles in the area. I think this is the most interesting aspect of the book, because once you study the concepts covered, you have good knowledge to understand those articles. Overall, the book outperforms many other books, both in coverage and in the level of detail on each topic.

I haven't seen the first edition of this book, but judging from reviews (all of which are dated before the 2nd Edition came out, which was December 2002), the 2nd Edition has added a lot of new material that addresses some of the criticisms of the first edition. I used a pre-publication draft of this book in a class with Professor Chandrakasan last fall, and it covered topics such as transistor sizing, crosstalk and transmission line effects, threshold voltage level effects, logic synthesis (though this book does not go into HDL design), and many other more advanced topics. It's also been made more up-to-date, removing a lot of the dated material some reviews on this page have been complaining about. Since I am just learning this material, I cannot comment on how relevant or complete this new edition really is, but I would urge anyone who was disappointed with the first edition to check out the 2nd edition. Actually, I'd urge everyone who used the first edition to check it out. From what I've seen, it's like a completely different book.

Average (2 stars): Like most circuit design books, DIC doesn't cover issues that a serious circuit designer should know about. It does not mention or barely covers transistor sizing techniques, drive strengths for standard cell libraries, antenna rule checks, synthesis, and signal integrity issues like crosstalk. Sequencing elements like flipflops and latchs and memory design are covered poorly. Despite this, pipelining and parallelism are covered fairly effectively compared to other texts. Many other circuit design books are also fairly outdated now with respect to semiconductor technology. For instance at 10um cmos technology, leakage power is significant, but a casual reader would never know that you should increase the transistor threshold voltage or lengths on circuits on non-critical timing paths to control this nanometer effect.