ii To my dear wife, Liang iii Acknowledgments First, I would like to thank my advisor Professor Larry Pileggi for all his support and continuous guidance throughout the past five years. He opened up a wide variety of research topics that I can explore during my early years at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and helped me find my research path that eventually leads to this dissertation. Second,...

In the past few years, several tools for the automation of the analog integrated circuit (IC) cell and system layout design, with application on both new and reused designs have emerged. Yet, most of the layout design is still handmade, essentially because analog designers want to have total control over the different design options, and also, due to the fact that current fully automated genera...

Thermal effects are becoming increasingly important during integrated circuit design. Thermal characteristics influence reliability, power consumption, cooling costs, and performance. It is necessary to consider thermal effects during all levels of the design process, from the architectural level to the physical level. This is challenging because design-time temperature prediction requires acce...

Semiconductor designers are now in the business of system design and significant productivity improvements can only be reached through an additional investment upstream in architectural understanding. Chip layout strategies shall now result from such upstream decisions implying new developments in precharacterized cells used at the breadboard level, functional simulation using custom CAD tools....

Electronic circuit design typically begins with an assumption that the components are operating at ambient temperature. Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit (MMIC) design, in particular, violates this as the DC current fl owing through the ever-shrinking devices induces heating to two, three, or even four times greater temperature (in oC). Such a large departure from assumed room temperature...

Voltage controlled Oscillators or Ring Oscillators are crucial components in any timing and memory circuits. The goal of this paper is to do physical design for a high speed, low power consumption multistage high performance ring oscillator circuit based on 300 nm CMOS technology which provides frequency of high order (KHz). This oscillator is used for high speed wireless communication applicat...

In this paper the relationships between professional competences and school curriculain IC design industry are explored. The semi-structured questionnaire survey and focus group interview is the research method. Study participants are graduates of microelectronics engineering professional departments who are currently employed in the IC industry. The IC industries are defined as the electronic ...

Several regular circuit structures are proposed. They provide alternatives to the widely used standard-cell structure and have better predictability and a simpler design methodology. A regular global routing scheme is developed. A design flow for use with of all these regular fabrics is discussed.

Integration of circuit CAD activities into a single design framework requires that CAD data of widely diiering forms be integrated into a single design database. This results in data which is highly structured, multi-dimensional and very complex; most current database models (for example the relational model) lack the expressive power to eeciently represent such data. The authors have developed...