prepping for VLSI course

[Mattjd]

Hi so in the fall I have to take a VLSI course at my university. I'm seeking advice on what topics to brush up on to best prepare me. The official description of the course is

This course provides an introduction to the design and implementation of Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) circuits for complex digital systems with a focus on CMOS technology. Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) and Full-custom techniques will be explored and used to design basic cells and regular structures such as data-path and memory arrarys. The emphasis is on modern design issues in power, interconnected and clocking. Topics include: VLSI design flow; transistor-level CMOS physical design; gate function and timing characteristics; high-level digital functional blocks; and CMOS digitial chip design. Students will design and verify circuits using commercial Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools.

Thanks

[Dubbie]

Do you have any experience in any related area already?

[Bassman59]

It wouldn’t hurt to have a good background in semiconductor physics.

[Nitrousoxide]

Good experience with hardware developer languages might help, if not that, at least some competency at discrete logic design/boolean algebra/state machines.

Semiconductor design and layout would also help.

[rstofer]

Does the course list a bunch of prerequisites?  This sounds like an introductory course to me, no specific knowledge required.  You're going to be learning to use CAD tools, the course doesn't seem to require that you already have that experience.

I might fool around with VHDL and Verilog (or possibly System Verilog) just to get a feel for the hardware descriptive languages but I would realize that they're going to be teaching that stuff, not requiring it.

Look for the prerequisites.  Do you meet them?

[Mattjd]

Okay so my program is officially a Electrical-Computer Engineering degree. The classes that are relevant are:

1.) Intro to Digital Systems - We learn digital logic, how gates are made using CMOS technology, how state machines work, we implement everything in breadboards and/or fpga using verilog.

2.) Principles of Electrical Circuit Analysis - How to analyze circuits, Kirchovs laws, phasers, laplace, thevinin, op amps.

3.) Computer Architecture - We designed a 16 bit processor based on msp430 architecture, we implemented it using structural and dataflow verilog (behavioral was strictly not allowed to reinforce the digital logic part) it was synthesised onto an Altera DE0. The professor had a custom board that connected through GPIO and allowed us to visually what was in the registers, and what current instruction was in real time. We had to write a program and store it in ROM then see how fast we could get the processor to run before the program started to fail. We also had to implement peripherals such as timers, mouse, keyboard, vga, lcd screen, etc.

4.) Electronics 1 - Learned about diodes, bjt, mosfet, cmos, 3 stage amplifiers and their applications. Math-light explanation of the physics behind workings. We learned the general idea of how semiconductors work through movement of electrons and holes up through the shells to the valence band

5.) Signals and Systems - formal introduction to laplace and continuous fourier analysis, a prepping course for the next semester

6.) DSP - self explanatory

7.) Systems and Controls - self explanatory

Last semester:

1.) VLSI

2.) Electrical Communication Systems

[Mattjd]

Well I know how to use CMOS to make logic gates, I know how to wire logic gates up to make say muxs, decoders, flipflops, an ALU, data path, etc.

I always remember in the digital logic class the professor would talk about how you can make a logic gate of any size because eventually the signal would be too weak and we discussed propogation delays, race conditions, etc. but it was just talking.

I suppose VLSI will be where we learn about all that and what not?