Technology trends, driven by the desire for higher transistor densities and faster devices, have led to transistor dimensions scaling into the nanometre regime. However, with this continued scaling, digital Integrated Circuits (ICs) have faced many challenges that include: increased leakage power dissipation, increased process variations of transistor parameters and increased sensitivity of ICs...

The main objective of this work is to improve the design flow of analog and mixed signal integrated circuits. Purely digital systems profit from standardized tools and methods which allow automatic synthesis. In the analog domain, automatic synthesis has probably no sense and efforts must be done towards developing consistent and coherent CAD (Computer Aided Design) methods and tools. The main ...

The design of Integrated Circuit ASICs and SoCs typically relies on the availability of a library consisting of predefined components called technology cells. Silicon vendors use proprietary formats to describe technology cells and macro modules in conjunction with numerous translators to feed technology library data to Electronic Design Automation EDA tools. Multiple grammar formats are used t...

Three-dimensional integration technologies have been proposed in order to mitigate design challenges posed by deep-submicron interconnect. By providing multiple layers of active devices together with high-density local interconnects between these layers, 3-D technologies give digitalcircuit designers greater freedom in meeting power and delay budgets that are increasingly interconnect-dominated...

A use for programmable logic is presented targeting microelectronic circuit test engineering education. These devices offer strengths in cost, time and flexibility in an educational environment. The rationale for this work is to support electronic hardware design, fabrication and test for mixed-signal integrated circuits typically used in mixed-technology systems.

The aim of this work is to assist designing of robust circuits to minimize the amount of defective circuits and therefore to increase the yield of production. The Fraunhofer ITWM considers electronic circuits at system level using its EDA software Analog Insydes, which allows analysis and symbolic approx ima tion of nominal analog circuits. The software now has been extended to handle parameter...

Energy efficiency is one of the most important parameters for designing and building a computing system nowadays. Introduction of new transistor and memory technologies to the integrated circuits design have brought hope for low energy very large scale integration (VLSI) circuit design. This excellency is pleasant if the computing system is secure and the energy is not wasted through execution ...

To achieve higher performing systems, microelectronic system designers should consider the e ects of packaging while developing integrated circuits (ICs). This practice, which we call \Design for Packageability", should permit a global optimization of the entire system by incorporating critical packaging factors into the IC design ow. Managers and engineers must be able to perform an early anal...

Fast and accurate reliability estimation of integrated circuits is an open problem. Introducing the emerging nano devices such as FinFET and Stacked Silicon nanowires makes this problem even more challenging because of higher lithography fluctuation. We discuss several previous efforts for reliable circuit design and propose a methodology for accurate reliability estimation of novel transistors.

This article deals with modeling and design of a new fault-tolerant voter circuit. Majority voted redundancy is increasingly implemented in fault-tolerant design today. A voter is used in these implementations to determine a possibly correct result through the majority vote. The reliability of the voter circuit should be much higher than that of the other circuit elements; otherwise it will wip...