17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
CMOS IC Layout book review, June 5, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: CMOS IC Layout: Concepts, Methodologies, and Tools (Paperback)
I have been a layout designer for 10 years and this is the first book I have found that is devoted exclusively to ic layout. It is about time. Your book does a good job of covering layout in the broad sense which make sit good for beginners and junior layout designers. I especially think you did a good job explaining the concepts of layers, basic design rules and transistor fingering. I do feel that you could have spent more time with transistor, resistor and capacitor matching from an analog perspective. Like most text and tools, your emphasis was on digital circuit. Keep up the good work and I look forward to the 2nd edition...
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
authors review, May 22, 2000
This review is from: CMOS IC Layout: Concepts, Methodologies, and Tools (Paperback)
Most textbooks on VLSI cover circuit design techniques or algorithms for CAD tools but none of them are explaining extensively IC Layout challenges. For today's industry, with so many new tools, platforms, methodologies, and design styles being developed all the time, a more unified format is needed. Now here it is, and is for more readers that you may think:
Students studying VLSI Design need a comprehensive textbook for IC Layout so their projects can be actually manufactured... Students studying Computer Engineering or Science and tools for VLSI need a book to help them understand the physical limitations from processing and design... IC layout designers around the world need a detailed training curriculum that covers more than just one type of layout... Design engineers need a book that can help them to understand the layout concepts so their designs can be more realistic and easier to implement... Software developers need a source of information beyond "clean room" specifications, they need a users voice with the specific industry language... Technical marketing and sales people need a dictionary to understand the language and the concepts required by their customers when they sale software and their own design teams when they sell a product...
But a book about layout is not complete if there are no color graphics. The problem is that colored pages inside a black and white book is very expensive and would have raised the price of our book. We wanted to make this book as affordable as possible so together with the publishers we decided to offer you a solution, a CD-ROM with additional color pictures. So, you will find in the CD-ROM attached all the color files that we prepared for your edification. But this is not all; we included a full demo version of L-Edit, from Tanner Research Inc. The demo content includes the entire Tanner tools demo so is useful for a new designer or student to try each of them. From our point of view is a tremendous opportunity for a reader to try as he/she learns about each topic. The demo provides access to "danclein" library so once you learned how to open the library all our secrets will be in your hands.
In the near future, we will try to build a web site that can be used as questions and answer place.
Please send us Email at cometic@ieee.org for any enquiry.
We hope that you will enjoy reading our book at list as much as we enjoyed writing it!
Dan Clein & Gregg Shimokura
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Simplest book to start out in chip mask design., October 21, 2001
This review is from: CMOS IC Layout: Concepts, Methodologies, and Tools (Paperback)
This book is a good choice to learn mask design if you want to keep it as simple and cook-book like as possible. The book focuses on basic CMOS digital. Approximately 80 percent of all mask design is in CMOS digital, so that makes sense. Ancillary topics are brought up, such as simplified electronic conceptualizations of transistors, resistors, capacitance, current density, it even touches on more specialized areas such as floor planning and routing. This book covers a lot of ground lightly, but never with any engineering depth. I ignored those areas where, in my opinion, the author crossed the line of over-simplification for the sake of simplicity (the indication of current flow in P transistors is well meaning but incorrect, for example). (Now that several years have passed and I have seen first-hand how this has at times confused mask design students, I feel that it should be mentioned.)
Engineers and experienced mask designers should consider one of the more in-depth books, such as The Art of Analog Layout, or IC Layout Basics: A Practical Guide, or IC Mask Design: Essential Layout Techniques, or one of the many VLSI Design 101 texts for electronic engineering students.
Purchase 'The Art of Analog Layout' if you want to focus on analog mask design issues, the physical issues rather than the software), or any of the above-mentioned books for the more specialized or difficult material such as analog layout, the bipolar transistor, power, VFET, MESFET, heterojunction, GaAs, SiGe, discrete, infra-red low bandgap materials, light collection, minority carriers, high voltage layout techniques, or anything more difficult, advanced, unusual, or for engineers versus mask designers. 'The Art of Analog Layout' is good enough to be an excellent reference for even the working mask designer and engineer.
If you wish to learn mask design as if it were more like drafting, as some vocational schools still do, then this book is for you. I'm a senior analog chip design engineer and an advanced-level mask designer. I've worked with beginning mask designers. My opinion is that the mask-design-like-drafting path does not an excellent mask designer make, but you've got to start somewhere.
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