Customer Reviews

Digital Integrated Circuit Design: From VLSI Architectures to CMOS Fabrication

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This book gives a top-down approach of designing latest digital integrated circuits by covering all topics of integrated digital circuit design within over 800 pages.
I can recommend this book for people who already have basic knowledge of IC design and want to get a closer look over the whole topic and problems that arise in present technologies and research.
The author starts from the top level of system integration down to the CMOS devices, physics and their problems for designing circuits. He also provides information to semiconductor business and workflow of the industry as well as functionality of EDA tools.
Each Chapters starts with a few words on the current contexts and ends with several short problems for self studying and an appendix with more information leading to even more resources.
The knowledge is enhanced by definitions and many very helpful observations. Theories often contain real life examples and also some guidelines for designers, in addition many examples with data values from present devices from famous manufacturers are given.

In contrast to usual books, the author starts with architectures and techniques, like pipelining, replication and time sharing for implementing algorithms.
Next he explains hardware description languages on the example of VHDL, yet the focus of this chapter is not the syntax of VHDL but processing of VHDL and its impact on the design. Also there are some examples for the major circuits and guidelines that are used within a design.
This is followed by timing and clocking techniques for digital circuits. Here synchronous and asynchronous disciplines and characterizations of all different types of phase and edge triggered clocks in a design are described. This part also faces all problems of asynchronous data handling, and how to circumvent its drawbacks. All explanations are illustrated with helpful timing diagrams and figures of common circuit configurations.
Finally, it starts to get into gate and transistor level design. Basics of CMOS behavior and logic gates are illustrated, extended by considerations on energy dissipation, supply voltage drop and noise on a die, physical models for the design and electrical characteristics. Verification techniques of functionality and design are explained along with the design flow of EDA tools.
A very nice and rather exotic part of the book is the chapter "VLSI Economics and Project Management". There is all kind of workflows, cost models and market sides discussed and displayed in an overview.
The book is completed by a chapter on semiconductor physics, functionality of CMOS devices and outlooks to the CMOS Technology of tomorrow.
As a solely negative point remains: there are too many topics. Many problems are shown and explained, but don't have a detailed solution. The author countervails this situation by giving good references to work on further and support material at the publishers homepage.

As the author of the book has not (yet) purchased a book through amazon.com he was unable to add a comment. I am posting his message on his behalf:

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As the author of the book, please let me clarify that it has not been my intention to elaborate on transistor-level circuit design in too much detail. Rather, the book primarily covers topics that are most relevant from a systems perspective (including hardware architecture design, functional verification techniques, the usage of VHDL for circuit synthesis and simulation, improving energy efficiency, virtual components, economic aspects, and project management). While many lower-level issues (such as transistor-level circuits, geometric layout, CMOS fabrication steps etc.) are being discussed in separate chapters, these have deliberately been placed towards the end of the text as most digital VLSI designers today are no longer concerned with them in great detail. The top-down approach in the book naturally follows the industrial design flow and makes the material more accessible to readers with different backgrounds.

Please also note that more customer reviews are available at www.amazon.de and maybe other Amazon stores too.

Thank you, H. Kaeslin
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Great. I luved the condition of the book. Really a good bet for the price

I spend less than 2 hours about this book because I don't know research direction about this subject. I think this book talked about architectural level of VLSI system. If you want to design transistor level digital gate. Please consult professor Sung Mo Kang textbook.