Customer Reviews

Modern VLSI Design: System-on-Chip Design (3rd Edition)

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A start of the art chip may well have over 10 million or 100 million transistors. How to design such a formidable device? Wolf gives a decent explanation to the student or engineer. You have to be careful here. The term VLSI has been in wide use since the 80s. There are scads of books with "VLSI" in their titles. Yet an unwary reader might end up trolling an obsolete text. With Wolf's book, the material reflects current design standards.

One clear difference between his book and a text from, say, 1990, is the relative deprecating of small scale circuit design. To be sure, he does explain various techniques for putting together simple circuits. These are still necessary skills. But much higher level design skills now come into play when dealing with millions of transistors.

For instance, scrutinise the chapter on floor planning. The real estate taken up by interconnect is a significant fraction of the chip. Being able to optimise subsystem layout according to various criteria like distributing a clock with minimal skew or distributing sufficient power is vital. Luckily, it is not all rule of thumb. The chapter delves into various methods to aid you.

The book should give you a good exposure to VLSI ideas.

After some years in the IC design business (mostly analog) I needed to teach a course on ASICSs. This book was the text specified by my predecessor. I did not like the book, and eventually read the Weste and Harris book in its 3rd edition. Wolf is not nearly as clear, complete and logically organized as Weste and Harris - no comparison.

This could be a great book but it is let down by truly awful editing. Wolf writes well but his clarity is lost in the sea of mistakes that made it to press. The text often refers to the wrong figure or to one not present, figures are duplicated, formulas have mistakes in them (including easy to find errors like mismatched parenthesis), node and component names are renamed in place but not another, etc., etc.

Basically the editors were asleep at the wheel. In general you will spend easily as much time trying to weed out the numerous mistakes as you will actually learning anything. Or worse give up thinking that the subject matter is beyond you.

How this book made it to third edition in such a raw state is beyond me and a black mark on Prentice Hall's usually excellent editorial reputation. Do yourself a favor and avoid this book.