Uncertainty in key parameters within a chip and between different chips in the deep sub micron area plays a more and more important role. As a result, manufacturing process spreads need to be considered during the design process. Quantitative methodology is needed to ensure faultless functionality, despite existing process variations within given bounds, during product development. This book presents the technological, physical, and mathematical fundamentals for a design paradigm shift, from a deterministic process to a probability-orientated design process for microelectronic circuits. Readers will learn to evaluate the different sources of variations in the design flow in order to establish different design variants, while applying appropriate methods and tools to evaluate and optimize their design.

This book discusses the digital design of integrated circuits under process variations, with a focus on design-time solutions. The authors describe a step-by-step methodology, going from logic gates to logic paths to the circuit level. Topics are presented in comprehensively, without overwhelming use of analytical formulations. Emphasis is placed on providing digital designers with understanding of the sources of process variations, their impact on circuit performance and tools for improving their designs to comply with product specifications. Various circuit-level “design hints” are highlighted, so that readers can use then to improve their designs. A special treatment is devoted to unique design issues and the impact of process variations on the performance of FinFET based circuits. This book enables readers to make optimal decisions at design time, toward more efficient circuits, with better yield and higher reliability.

Knowledge exists: you only have to ?nd it VLSI design has come to an important in?ection point with the appearance of large manufacturing variations as semiconductor technology has moved to 45 nm feature sizes and below. If we ignore the random variations in the manufacturing process, simulation-based design essentially becomes useless, since its predictions will be far from the reality of manufactured ICs. On the other hand, using design margins based on some traditional notion of worst-case scenarios can force us to sacri?ce too much in terms of power consumption or manufacturing cost, to the extent of making the design goals even infeasible. We absolutely need to explicitly account for the statistics of this random variability, to have design margins that are accurate so that we can ?nd the optimum balance between yield loss and design cost. This discontinuity in design processes has led many researchers to develop effective methods of statistical design, where the designer can simulate not just the behavior of the nominal design, but the expected statistics of the behavior in manufactured ICs. Memory circuits tend to be the hardest hit by the problem of these random variations because of their high replication count on any single chip, which demands a very high statistical quality from the product. Requirements of 5–6s (0.

Three-Dimensional Integrated Circuit Design, Second Eition, expands the original with more than twice as much new content, adding the latest developments in circuit models, temperature considerations, power management, memory issues, and heterogeneous integration. 3-D IC experts Pavlidis, Savidis, and Friedman cover the full product development cycle throughout the book, emphasizing not only physical design, but also algorithms and system-level considerations to increase speed while conserving energy. A handy, comprehensive reference or a practical design guide, this book provides effective solutions to specific challenging problems concerning the design of three-dimensional integrated circuits. Expanded with new chapters and updates throughout based on the latest research in 3-D integration: - Manufacturing techniques for 3-D ICs with TSVs - Electrical modeling and closed-form expressions of through silicon vias - Substrate noise coupling in heterogeneous 3-D ICs - Design of 3-D ICs with inductive links - Synchronization in 3-D ICs - Variation effects on 3-D ICs - Correlation of WID variations for intra-tier buffers and wires - Offers practical guidance on designing 3-D heterogeneous systems - Provides power delivery of 3-D ICs - Demonstrates the use of 3-D ICs within heterogeneous systems that include a variety of materials, devices, processors, GPU-CPU integration, and more - Provides experimental case studies in power delivery, synchronization, and thermal characterization

Increasing performance demands in integrated circuits, together with limited energy budgets, force IC designers to find new ways of saving power. One innovative way is the presented adaptive voltage scaling scheme, which tunes the supply voltage according to the present process, voltage and temperature variations as well as aging. The voltage is adapted “on the fly” by means of in-situ delay monitors to exploit unused timing margin, produced by state-of-the-art worst-case designs. This book discusses the design of the enhanced in-situ delay monitors and the implementation of the complete control-loop comprising the monitors, a control-logic and an on-chip voltage regulator. An analytical Markov-based model of the control-loop is derived to analyze its robustness and stability. Variation-Aware Adaptive Voltage Scaling for Digital CMOS Circuits provides an in-depth assessment of the proposed voltage scaling scheme when applied to an arithmetic and an image processing circuit. This book is written for engineers interested in adaptive techniques for low-power CMOS circuits.

This book contains extended and revised versions of the best papers presented during the fourteenth IFIP TC 10/WG 10.5 International Conference on Very Large Scale Integration. This conference provides a forum to exchange ideas and show industrial and academic research results in microelectronics design. The current trend toward increasing chip integration and technology process advancements brings about stimulating new challenges both at the physical and system-design levels.

Advances in design methods and process technologies have resulted in a continuous increase in the complexity of integrated circuits (ICs). However, the increased complexity and nanometer-size features of modern ICs make them susceptible to manufacturing defects, as well as performance and quality issues. Testing for Small-Delay Defects in Nanoscale CMOS Integrated Circuits covers common problems in areas such as process variations, power supply noise, crosstalk, resistive opens/bridges, and design-for-manufacturing (DfM)-related rule violations. The book also addresses testing for small-delay defects (SDDs), which can cause immediate timing failures on both critical and non-critical paths in the circuit. Overviews semiconductor industry test challenges and the need for SDD testing, including basic concepts and introductory material Describes algorithmic solutions incorporated in commercial tools from Mentor Graphics Reviews SDD testing based on "alternative methods" that explores new metrics, top-off ATPG, and circuit topology-based solutions Highlights the advantages and disadvantages of a diverse set of metrics, and identifies scope for improvement Written from the triple viewpoint of university researchers, EDA tool developers, and chip designers and tool users, this book is the first of its kind to address all aspects of SDD testing from such a diverse perspective. The book is designed as a one-stop reference for current industrial practices, research challenges in the domain of SDD testing, and recent developments in SDD solutions.

This book discusses a number of challenges faced by designers of wireless receivers, given complications caused by the shrinking of electronic and mobile devices circuitry into ever-smaller sizes and the resulting complications on the manufacturability, production yield, and the end price of the products. The authors describe the impact of process technology on the performance of the end product and equip RF designers with countermeasures to cope with such problems. The mechanisms by which these problems arise are analyzed in detail and novel solutions are provided, including design guidelines for receivers with robustness to process variations and details of circuit blocks that obtain the required performance level. Describes RF receiver frontends and their building blocks from a system- and circuit-level perspective; Provides system-level analysis of a generic RF receiver frontend with robustness to process variations; Includes details of CMOS circuit design at 60GHz and reconfigurable circuits at 60GHz; Covers millimeter-wave circuit design with robustness to process variations.

Wavelet analysis and its applications have become one of the fastest growing research areas in the past several years. Wavelet theory has been employed in many fields and applications, such as signal and image processing, communication systems, biomedical imaging, radar, air acoustics, and endless other areas. Active media technology is concerned with the development of autonomous computational or physical entities capable of perceiving, reasoning, adapting, learning, cooperating, and delegating in a dynamic environment.This book consists of carefully selected and received papers presented at the conference, and is an attempt to capture the essence of the current state-of-the-art in wavelet analysis and active media technology. Invited papers included in this proceedings includes contributions from Prof P Zhang, T D Bui, and C Y Suen from Concordia University, Canada; Prof N A Strelkov and V L Dol'nikov from Yaroslavl State University, Russia; Prof Chin-Chen Chang and Ching-Yun Chang from Taiwan; Prof S S Pandey from R D University, India; and Prof I L Bloshanskii from Moscow State Regional University, Russia.

Since process variation and chip performance uncertainties have become more pronounced as technologies scale down into the nanometer regime, accurate and efficient modeling or characterization of variations from the device to the architecture level have become imperative for the successful design of VLSI chips. This book provides readers with tools for variation-aware design methodologies and computer-aided design (CAD) of VLSI systems, in the presence of process variations at the nanometer scale. It presents the latest developments for modeling and analysis, with a focus on statistical interconnect modeling, statistical parasitic extractions, statistical full-chip leakage and dynamic power analysis considering spatial correlations, statistical analysis and modeling for large global interconnects and analog/mixed-signal circuits. Provides readers with timely, systematic and comprehensive treatments of statistical modeling and analysis of VLSI systems with a focus on interconnects, on-chip power grids and clock networks, and analog/mixed-signal circuits; Helps chip designers understand the potential and limitations of their design tools, improving their design productivity; Presents analysis of each algorithm with practical applications in the context of real circuit design; Includes numerical examples for the quantitative analysis and evaluation of algorithms presented. Provides readers with timely, systematic and comprehensive treatments of statistical modeling and analysis of VLSI systems with a focus on interconnects, on-chip power grids and clock networks, and analog/mixed-signal circuits; Helps chip designers understand the potential and limitations of their design tools, improving their design productivity; Presents analysis of each algorithm with practical applications in the context of real circuit design; Includes numerical examples for the quantitative analysis and evaluation of algorithms presented.