Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering organised a seminar on VLSI technologies to II ECE students on 16-09-2023.
The main obejctive of this program is to create awareness on VLSI technologies and their implementation in current societal needs. Where students can develop their own projects relavent to different applications.Very-large-scale integration (VLSI) is the process of creating an integrated circuit (IC) by combining thousands of transistors into a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when complex semiconductor and communication technologies were being developed. The microprocessor is a VLSI device.VLSI is mainly used to design electronic components like microprocessors and memory chips, which require millions of transistors
- System specification: The objective of the desired final product is written in this step. During system specification, the designated cost of the system, its performance, architecture, and how the system will communicate with the external world are to be determined. During this step, the design specification should be provided by the users or clients.
- Architectural design: The basic architecture of the desired design must meet the system specifications of the desired design. The architecture of the desired design is decided and the layout for the same is designed by design engineers. Architectural design includes the integration of analog and mixed-signal b1ocks,memory management, internal and external communication, power requirements, and choice of process technology and layer stacks.
- Functional design or Behavioral design: It consists of refining the design specification of the desired design in order to design the functional behavior of the desired system. The main objective of this is to generate design a liigh-performance architectural design within the cost requirements posed by the specifications.
- Logic Design: In this step, the structure of the desired design is added to the behavioral representation of the desired design. The main specifications to be considered for logic design are logic minimization, performance enhancement, and testability. Logic design must also consider the problems associated with test vector generation, error detection, and error correction. Many logic synthesis tools have been developed for the automation of the process of logic design.
- Circuit Design: In this step, the logic blocks of the desired design are replaced by the electronic circuits, which are consists of electronic devices such as resistors, capacitors, and transistors. Circuit simulation of the desired design is done at this stage, in order to verify the timing behavior of the desired system. KirchhofPs laws are used to know the behavior of the electronic circuit in terms of node voltages and branch circuits. The result of integrodifferential equations is then solved in discrete- time. SPICE is a well-known program for circuit simulation.
Physical Design: In this step, the actual layout of the desired system is done, where all the components will be placed in the circuit and all these components are interconnected. The actual layout of the desired system can affect the area, correctness, and performance of the final desired product. The correctness of the chip is also controlled by the physical design.
Gone are the days when huge computers made of vacuum tubes sat humming in entire dedicated rooms and could do about 360 multiplications of 10 digit numbers in a second. Though they were heralded as the fastest computing machines of that time, they surely don't stand a chance when compared to the modem-day machines. Modem-day computers are getting smaller, faster, and cheaper, and more power-efficient every progressing second. But what drove this change? The whole domain of computing ushered into a new dawn of electronic miniaturization with the advent of semiconductor transistor by Bardeen (1947-48) and then the Bipolar Transistor by Shockley (1949) in the Bell Laboratory. VLSI is dominated by the CMOS technology and much like other logic families, this too has its limitations which have been battled and improved upon since years. Taking the example of a processor, the process technology has rapidly sluunk from 180 rim in 1999 to 60nm in 2008 and now it stands at 45nm and attempts being made to reduce it fiirtlier (32nm) while the Die area which had shrunk initially now is increasing owing to the added benefits of greater packing density and a larger feature size which would mean more number of transistors on a chip
