The modern integrated circuit is one of the most complex products that has been engineered to-date. It continues to grow in complexity as the years progress. As a result, very large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuit design now involves massive design teams employing state-of-the art computer-aided design (CAD) tools. One of the oldest, yet most important CAD problems for VLSI circuits is physical...

Absfrncr -The computer-aided design of a VLSI PCM-FDM transmultiplexer is presented. The entire design process from sysrem specifiearions to integrated circuit layout is carried out with the aid of specialized computer programs for analysis, synthesis and optimization at each design level: the firter network, the architecture and the circuit layout. These CAD tools support a top-down custom des...

We will present a power estimation technique for digital integrated circuits that operates at the register transfer level (RTL). Such a high-level power estimation capability is required in order to provide early warning of any power problems, before the circuit-level design has been speci ed. With such early warning, the designer can explore design trade-o s at a higher level of abstraction th...

Abnormal IDDQ (Quiescent VDD supply current) indicates the existence of physical damage in a circuit. Using this phenomenon, a CAD-based fault diagnosis technology has been developed to analyze the manufacturing yield of logic LSI. This method to detect the fatal defect fragments in several abnormalities identified with wafer inspection apparatus includes a way to separate various leakage fault...

During the application of simulation tools of computational electromagnetics it is sometimes difficult to decide whether the problems can be solved by the computation of electromagnetic fields or circuit simulation tools have to be applied additionally. The paper describes a typical situation in an electromagnetic CAD course, not only for beginners. The modelling and numerical simulation of a s...

In this thesis, a computer-aided-design (CAD) system is developed that assists in the design of novel three-dimensional integrated circuits. The software tools allow for the specification of a multilayer transistor circuit by means that are readily accessible to those familiar with two-dimensional CMOS VLSI design. This software system provides desirable features such as SPICE circuit extractio...

A CAD tool for analog circuit synthesis is presented. This tool, called FASY, uses fuzzy–logic based reasoning to select one topology among a fixed set of alternatives. For the selected topology, a two–phase optimizer sizes all elements to satisfy the performance constrains minimizing a cost function. In FASY, the decision rules used in the topology selection process are introduced by an expert...

This thesis contributes to the computer-aided design (CAD) of spiral inductors and LC resonators with spiral inductors exploiting full-wave electromagnetic (EM) analysis. The spiral inductor is widely used in radio frequency integrated circuits (RF ICs), such as low noise amplifiers (LNA) and voltage controlled oscillators (VCO). The design of spiral inductors has a direct influence on the perf...

Meeting timing requirements is an important constraint imposed on highly integrated circuits, and the verification of timing of a circuit before manufacturing is one of the critical tasks to be solved by CAD tools. In this paper, a new approach and the implementation of several algorithms to speed up gate-level timing simulation are proposed where, instead of gate delays, path delays for tree-l...