Course Instructor:  Harry Veendrick

Who Should Attend?

This course is meant as a comprehensive tutorial on the basics of integrated circuits for those individuals who work in the non-technical disciplines of semiconductors: management, marketing and sales, software development and others with little or no technical background in integrated circuits, but who need an understanding of their complexity, their operation, their possibilities and limitations to communicate better with their technical contacts in the field.

Course Aims

This course has been designed to:

• Provide an overview of the basics of digital circuits, analog to digital transformation, basics of digital logic and number systems. In addition, it offers an insight into the complexity of an integrated circuit based on similarities with the development of a big city.
• Discusses the issues of modern ICs today: lithography, process technology, design and its increasing complexity, memories, VLSI, the necessity of low-power, testing and failure analysis and finally, scaling, roadblocks and costs.

Course Format

The course consists of four two-hour lectures. The course text is Harry Veendrick's book 'Nanometer CMOS ICs - from Basics to ASICs' and each delegate will receive a free copy on the first day.

Course Content

The course is a bottom-up, hierarchical approach to the subject of basic circuit and systems design using standard CMOS technologies. Simple modelling techniques are used to gain understanding and intuition into the function of circuits. Computer simulation is used to predict circuit performance. Techniques suitable to enhanced performance using integrated circuit technology are used. In addition, the implications of IC fabrication are used whenever possible to associate the electrical performance with the physical attributes of the circuit.

Basic Section:

Basic Principles:

• How to convert from analog to digital.
• How to convert from decimal to binary numbers.

Digital Circuits:

• Basic logic gates
• Basic logic operations
• Synchronous designs
• Digital functions on a chip
• Complexity of digital circuits

Similarity between chip design and a city plan - How do we design a chip?

• Standard cell design
• libraries

Characteristics of end-market products:

• Examples of ICs
• Flavour of the different product requirements of automotive, mobile and consumer
• Identification of applications

CMOS Section:

CMOS process technology basics:

• Basic lithography and CMOS process steps

CMOS Design:

• Simple circuit examples and layouts

VLSI and ASICs:

• Basic design flow
• Hierarchy levels
• IP cores
• Re-use
• ASICs

Low-power:

• Battery overview
• Flavour of technology and design options for low power and standby power

Robustness of ICs:

• Flavour of reliability and operating margin reduction aspects due to scaling
• ESD
• Electromigration
• Noise
• Soft-errors
• Process spread

Testing, Debugging, Packaging, Failure Analysis and Yield:

• Short overview on fundamentals of testing and failure analysis
• Basics of yield
• Packaging characteristics and trends

Scaling Trends and Roadblocks:

• Costs and roadblocks for 65 nm technologies and beyond
• Speed and power trends
• Design, masks and processing costs
• Roadblocks and solutions
• End of Moore's Law!

Scaling Trends and Roadblocks:

• Costs and roadblocks for 65 nm technologies and beyond, speed and power trends, design, masks and processing costs, roadblocks and solutions, end of Moore's Law!

For information on the course tutor for this course see here.