ECE 8273 - VLSI Systems - Fall 2007

The textbook for this course is the same textbook as used for ECE 4263 (Intro to VLSI) "CMOS VLSI Design: A Circuits and Systems Perspective (3rd Edition)" by Neil Weste and David Harris, Addison Wesley, ISBN: 0-321-14901-7. We will also make substantial use of journal and conference papers available from IEEE Explore.

The class email is ece8273-01.fall2007@courses.msstate.edu . I will use this periodically to announce information about the course such as modifications to homeworks, labs, test dates, etc.

All external assignments are to be INDIVIDUAL work. You may discuss the assignments with other students but you may not share any work, or show anybody your work as examples of how to do something. Students are expected to follow the MSU Honor Code as documented HERE . All students expected to be familiar with the definition of Academic Misconduct and the Academic Dishonesty Sanctions.

These lecture notes are information that I have put together from various knowledge sources; very little is original creation by myself. I have tried to give credit to original sources if at all possible. Several lectures are Powerpoint slides created by David Harrison, the author of our textbook.

DRAMs, Non-volatile Memories (basic SRAMS covered in VLSI 1)

1. DRAM Intro
2. Some notes on DRAM technology by David Morano, Northeastern Univ
3. Introduction to Non-volatile Memory

Clocks

1. Clocking Evolution
2. Synchronization

Power Management

1. Power Management

1. Adders (David Harrison)

1. Design for Test (David Harrison)

1. Shifting/Multiplication

1. Floating Point Introduction
2. Floating Point slides by Behrooz Parhami . These slides are from Dr. Parhami's textbook website and cover Chapters 17-20 from his textbook, Computer Arithmetic: Algorithms and Hardware Designs . Because of the large number of slides in this presentation, the following are the ones that we will discuss in class: 1-13, 33-34,40,41, 42.

1. TUESDAY KEYNOTE | Perspective of the Future Semiconductor Industry: Challenges and Solutions Speaker: Oh-Hyun Kwon - President, System LSI Division, Samsung Semiconductor Business
2. Thousand-Core Chips - A Technology Perspective, Shekhar Y. Borkar - Intel Corp.
3. 42.4 Multi-Core Design Automation Challenges Speaker/Author: John Darringer - IBM Corp

SOI Introduction

ASIC CAD Flows

This is a preliminary test schedule, tests are closed textbook, closed notes, four-function or scientific calculator only.

• Test #1, September 28th, Study Guide, Solution
• Test #2, November 19th?, Study Guide

• DRAM

DRAM survey presentations


• Embedded DRAM with concurrent referesh
• Floating Body Cell DRAM
• Embedded DRAM with data retention low-power mode
• Embedded DRAM with ultra-low voltage logic
• 2T1D Memory Cell DRAM
• Embedded DRAM with Planar MOS Storage Capacitor
• Clocking

Clocking presentations


• Reconfigurable Clock Distribution
• Altera FPGA Clock Distribution
• Rotary Clocking
• Xilinx FPGA Clock Distribution
• Redundant Clocks
• Clocking in the Cell Processor
• Spectre Simulation: Power , Spectre technology files, spectre example , Reports due two hours before class time on Friday September 14th, we will discuss the results in class.
  1. Submission Script
• Adder Design, reports due two hours before classtime on Friday September 21st. See the homework document that was sent via email.
  1. Submission Script
• Multiplier Design, reports due two hours before classtime on Friday, October 5th. See the homework document that was sent via email.
  1. Submission Script
• Clock Tree Design, reports due two hours before classtime on Friday, October 19th. See the homework document that was sent via email.
1. Submission Script
• Floating Point Unit synthesis - reports due two hours before classtime on Friday, October 26th. See the homework document that was sent via email.
1. Submission Script
• Floating Point Unit layout - reports due two hours before classtime on Friday, November 2nd. See the homework document that was sent via email.
1. Submission Script
• Floating Point Unit power analysis See the homework document that was sent via email.
1. Submission Script, Part 1 - due Friday, November 9th
• Submission Script, Part 2 - due Friday, November 16th

One way to get X11 forwarding to work with our convoluted sungrid cluster setup is the following steps (if you can't get the normal Tunneling methods to work).

1. Login into Yavin, set the environment DISPLAY variable to 'xxx.xxx.xx.xx:0.0' where 'xxx.xxx.xx.xx' is the IP address of your local machine (you can use the X-win32 configuration window, click on the 'X' in the righthand corner tray, and look at the 'DISPLAY' tab). How you set the DISPLAY variable depends on what Linux shell you are running. Verify that you can pop up an Xterm to your local machine.
2. In the original shell, login into Talus.ece.msstate.edu, set the environment variable again, verify that you can pop up an XTERM. If you can't, then set the DISPLAY environment variable again to 'xxx.xxx.xx.xx:0.0'.
3. Do 'swsetup sungrid' to put the sungrid executables on your path.
4. Do 'qlogin' to schedule an interactive job on a cluster machine. Try pop'ing up an Xterm; if it does not work, try again to set the environment variable to 'xxx.xxx.xx.xx:0.0' and try again.