Year 2013-3014; Spring Semester; Prof. Dinesh Kumar Sharma

Motivation for the course: The course goes from basics of digital circuits and MOSFETs to critical issues like testing strategies of circuits. So the course is prerequisite for those who wish to work in the area of VLSI circuits. Also the course gives chance to study Verilog which also is important part of research in circuits.

Course contents: Following are the contents discussed

  • Basics of system hardware design.
  • Hierarchical design using top-down and bottom-up methodology.
  • System partitioning techniques, interfacing between system components.
  • Handling multiple clock domains, Synchronous and asynchronous design styles. Interface between synchronous and asynchronous blocks.
  • Meta-stability and techniques for handling it.
  • Interfacing linear and digital systems, data conversion circuits.
  • Design of finite state machines, state assignment strategies. Design and optimization of pipelined stages.
  • Use of data flow graphs, Critical path analysis, retiming and scheduling strategies for performance enhancement.
  • Signal integrity and high speed behavior of interconnects: ringing, cross talk and ground bounce.
  • Power supply decoupling.
  • Test strategies: Border Scan, Built- In-Self-Test and signature analysis.
  • Loss-less transmission lines. Arithmetic circuits were discussed in detail.
  • Micro-pipelines using C-element were discussed.
  • Feedback equalizers e.g. decision FE and Feed forward equalizer (short discussion).
  • Interfacing with analog systems e.g. data converters were discussed. Implementation of DSP algorithms was not discussed.

This course would give feeble introduction of many aspects of digital circuits but not in-depth analysis. Many topics could have been discussed and given some more insight in terms of applications or research.

Pre-requisite: There are no specific prerequisite mentioned. Also Prof. would start the course with most basic things in MOSFET and arithmetic circuits which makes course quite self-sufficient. Still to understand course better EM waves (EE301) would help as transmission lines are discussed. Also VLSI design (EE671) would help for general understanding of MOSFETs and interconnects.

Feedback on lectures: Lectures by Prof. D. K. Sharma were useful but not concise. Many a times they were stretched on some very easy topics and he skipped on some important topics like feedback equalizers. There were guest lecturers like Prof. H. Narayanan for graph theory and Prof. Janak Patel for testing part, of the course.

Difficulty level: The course overall is moderately difficult. There were two coding assignments which were a bit lengthy but helpful in terms of getting the feel of what we have learnt. But again as they were not compulsory, very few of the students actually got advantage of learning. Exams have easy and moderately difficult parts, but exams’ questions were mostly based on how much can u remember not on the actual understanding! About grading if you attend the lectures you can get AB or AA easily.

Study material and references: No book in particular will be followed during the course. Class notes are well sufficient. Also Prof. will provide with some research papers related to ongoing topic in class. Notes on transmission lines by Prof. M.P. Desai are also provided.

  • Jan M. Rabaey, “Digital Integrated Circuits”, Prentice Hall of India, (New Delhi), 1997.
  • M.J.S. Smith, “Application Specific Integrated Circuits”, Addison Wesley (Reading, MA), 1999.
  • Vijay K. Madisetti, “VLSI Digital Signal Processing”, IEEE Press (NY, USA), 1995.

Miscellaneous: The course builds foundation for future work in VLSI design space. Course which can be taken and will use knowledge from this course are VLSI design lab, Markov chains and queuing systems, Embedded system design. In the end to make more out of the course you should learn on yourself beyond the class.