ECE 261: Full Custom VLSI Design

Prof. James Morizio

Dept. Electrical and Computer Engineering
Hudson Hall
Ph: 201-7759
E-mail: jmorizio@ee.duke.edu
URL: http://www.ee.duke.edu/~jmorizio

Course URL:
http://www.ee.duke.edu/~jmorizio/ece261/261.html

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 Course Objectives
• Introduction to CMOS VLSI design methodologies
– Emphasis on full-custom design
– Circuit and system levels
• Extensive use of Mentor Graphics CAD tools for IC design,
simulation, and layout verification
• Specific techniques for designing high-speed, low-power, and
easily-testable circuits

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 Designing for VLSI
• Designing a system on a chip
– Craft components from silicon rather than selecting catalog parts
• ICs (chips) are batch fabricated
– Inexpensive unit cost
• Bugs are hard to fix!
– Extensive design verification needed

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 VLSI Design: Overview
• VLSI design is system design
– Designing fast inverters is fun, but need knowledge of all aspects
of digital design: algorithms, systems, circuits, fabrication, and
packaging
– Need to bridge gap between abstract vision of digital design and
the underlying digital circuit and its peculiarities
– Circuit-level optimization, verification, and testing techniques are
important
• Tall thin approach does not always work
– Today’s designer is “fatter”, but well-versed in both high-level and
low-level design skills

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 VLSI: Enabling Technology
• Automotive electronic systems
– A typical Chevrolet has 80 ICs (stereo systems, display panels, fuel
injection systems, smart suspensions, antilock brakes, airbags)
• Signal Processing (DSP chips, data acquisition systems)
• Transaction processing (bank ATMs)
• PCs, workstations
• Medical electronics (artificial eye, implants)
• Multimedia

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 Design Complexity
• Transistor counts and IC densities continue to
grow!
– Moore’s Law-The number of transistors on an IC doubles every
1.5 years
– Intel x486: 1 million transistors (1989), PowerPC: 2-3 million
transistors (1994), Pentium: 3.1 million transistors (1994), DEC
Alpha: 10 million transistors (1995)-9 million in SRAM, Pentium
IV (2001): 42 million transistors
• Memory (DRAM) is the “technology driver”
– 256 Mbits DRAM now commercially available

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 A Brief History
• 1958: First integrated circuit
– Flip-flop using two transistors
– Built by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments
• 2003
– Intel Pentium 4 µprocessor (55 million transistors)
– 512 Mbit DRAM (> 0.5 billion transistors)
• 53% compound annual growth rate over 45 years
– No other technology has grown so fast so long
• Driven by miniaturization of transistors
– Smaller is cheaper, faster, lower in power!
– Revolutionary effects on society

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 Annual Sales
• 1018 transistors manufactured in 2003
– 100 million for every human on the planet
Global Semiconductor Billings

200
(Billions of US$)

150

100

50

0
1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002

Year

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 VLSI Technology
• CMOS: Complementary Metal Oxide Silicon
– Based on voltage-controlled field-effect transistors (FETs)
• Other technologies: bipolar junction transistors
(BJTs), BiCMOS, gallium arsenide (GaAs)
– BJTs, BiCMOS, ECL circuits are faster but CMOS consumes
lower power and are easier to fabricate
– GaAs carriers have higher mobility but high integration levels are
difficult to achieve in GaAs technology

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 Transistor Types
• Bipolar transistors
– npn or pnp silicon structure
– Small current into very thin base layer controls large currents
between emitter and collector
– Base currents limit integration density
• Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors
– nMOS and pMOS MOSFETS
– Voltage applied to insulated gate controls current between source
and drain
– Low power allows very high integration

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 IC Manufacturing
• Some manufacturing processes are tightly coupled to the
product, e.g. Buick/Chevy assembly line
• IC manufacturing technology is more versatile
• CMOS manufacturing line can make circuits of any type
by changing some basic tools called masks
– The same plant can manufacture both microprocessors and microwave
controllers by simply changing masks
• Silicon wafers: raw materials of IC manufacturing
IC
Test
structure Wafer

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 The First Computer

The Babbage
Difference Engine
(1832)
25,000 parts
cost: £17,470
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ENIAC - The first electronic computer
(1946)

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 Invention of the Transistor
• Vacuum tubes ruled in first half of 20th century
Large, expensive, power-hungry, unreliable
• 1947: first point contact transistor
– John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at Bell Labs
– Read Crystal Fire
by Riordan, Hoddeson

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 MOS Integrated Circuits
• 1970’s processes usually had only nMOS transistors
– Inexpensive, but consume power while idle
– 1980s-present: CMOS processes for low idle power

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

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 Moore’s Law
• 1965: Gordon Moore plotted transistor on each
chip
– Fit straight line on semilog scale
– Transistor counts have doubled every 26 months
1,000,000,000

100,000,000
Integration Levels
Pentium 4

SSI: 10 gates
Pentium III
10,000,000 Pentium II
Pentium Pro
Transistors

Pentium
Intel486
1,000,000

MSI: 1000 gates

Intel386
80286
100,000
8086
10,000

LSI: 10,000 gates

8080
8008
4004
1,000

1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000

VLSI: > 10k gates
Year

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 Corollaries
• Many other factors grow exponentially
– Ex: clock frequency, processor performance
10,000

1,000 4004

8008

8080
Clock Speed (MHz)

100 8086

80286

Intel386

10 Intel486

Pentium

Pentium Pro/II/III

1 Pentium 4

1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005

Year

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 Evolution in Complexity

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 Evolution in Transistor Count

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 Evolution in Speed/Performance

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 Intel 4004 Micro-Processor

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 Intel Pentium (II) microprocessor

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 Silicon in 2010
Density AccessTime
(Gbits/cm2) (ns)
Die Area: 2.5x2.5 cm
DRAM 8.5 10
Voltage: 0.6 V
DRAM (Logic) 2.5 10
Technology: 0.07 µm
SRAM (Cache) 0.3 1.5

Density Max. Ave. Power Clock Rate

(Mgates/cm2) (W /cm2) (GHz)
Custom 25 54 3
Std. Cell 10 27 1.5
Gate Array 5 18 1
Single-Mask GA 2.5 12.5 0.7
FPGA 0.4 4.5 0.25

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 Design Abstraction Levels
SYSTEM

MODULE
+

GATE

CIRCUIT

DEVICE
G
S D
n+ n+

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 New Design Challenges
• Interconnect-centric design
– Capacitive coupling, inductance effects, delay modeling
• Power densities, power grid design, leakage
– 80 W/cm2 ∼ 100 W/cm2
• Nuclear reactor: 150 W/cm2
– 80% increase in power density per generation (voltage
scales by 0.8)
– 225% increase in current density
– 1.3V power supply leads to 60W power with 60A
sustained current
• 2X the current (surge) in your car’s alternator
• Statistical design (P,V,T)
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