Lecture

PVT Variations, Uncertainty, and Monte-Carlo Simulations

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In course

EE-429: Fundamentals of VLSI design

The course introduces the fundamentals of digital integrated circuits and the technology aspects from a designers perspective. It focuses mostly on transistor level, but discusses also the extension to large digital semicustom designs. ...

Description

This lecture covers the impact of PVT variations on integrated circuits, emphasizing the uncertainties in IC design due to process, voltage, and temperature variations. It discusses the challenges of variability, worst-case design paradigms, spatial and temporal correlations of variations, and the importance of Monte-Carlo simulations in estimating parametric yield. The instructor explains the significance of global operating corners, the limitations of binning for general-purpose computing, and the analysis of very high yield using Monte-Carlo simulations.

Instructors (2)

Andreas Peter Burg

Andreas Burg was born in Munich, Germany, in 1975. He received his Dipl.-Ing. degree in 2000 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. He then joined the Integrated Systems Laboratory of ETH Zurich, from where he graduated with the Dr. sc. techn. degree in 2006. In 1998, he worked at Siemens Semiconductors, San Jose, CA. During his doctoral studies, he was an intern with Bell Labs Wireless Research for a total of one year. From 2006 to 2007, he held positions as postdoctoral researcher at the Integrated Systems Laboratory and at the Communication Theory Group of the ETH Zurich. In 2007 he co-founded Celestrius, an ETH-spinoff in the field of MIMO wireless communication, where he was responsible for the ASIC development as Director for VLSI. In January 2009, he joined ETH Zurich as SNF Assistant Professor and as head of the Signal Processing Circuits and Systems group at the Integrated Systems Laboratory. In January 2011, he became a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) where he is leading the Telecommunications Circuits Laboratory in the School of Engineering. In June 2018 he was promoted to the role of a Tenured Associate Professor. In 2000, Mr. Burg received the Willi Studer Award and the ETH Medal for his diploma and his diploma thesis, respectively. Mr. Burg was also awarded an ETH Medal for his Ph.D. dissertation in 2006. In 2008, he received a 4-years grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) for an SNF Assistant Professorship. In his professional career, Mr. Burg was involved in the development of more than 25 ASICs. He is a member of the IEEE and of the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP). Research interests and expertise

Circuits and systems for telecommunications (wireless and wired)
Prototyping and silicon implementation of new communication technologies
Development of communication algorithms and optimization for hardware implementation
Low-power VLSI signal processing for communications and other applications
Digital integrated circuits
Circuits for image and video processing

Alexandre Sébastien Julien Willommet

Education 3D high density memory based on emering resistive technologies : circuit and architecture design | Microelectronics 2014 – 2017 CEA-Leti Teaching & PhD Courses Fundamentals of VLSI design EE-429 The course introduces the fundamentals of digital integrated circuits and the technology aspects from a designers perspective. It focuses mostly on transistor level, but discusses also the extension to large digital semicustom designs. Lab in advanced VLSI design

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Related concepts (32)

Integrated circuit

An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of miniaturized transistors and other electronic components are integrated together on the chip. This results in circuits that are orders of magnitude smaller, faster, and less expensive than those constructed of discrete components, allowing a large transistor count.

Very Large Scale Integration

Very large-scale integration (VLSI) is the process of creating an integrated circuit (IC) by combining millions or billions of MOS transistors onto a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when MOS integrated circuit (Metal Oxide Semiconductor) chips were developed and then widely adopted, enabling complex semiconductor and telecommunication technologies. The microprocessor and memory chips are VLSI devices. Before the introduction of VLSI technology, most ICs had a limited set of functions they could perform.

General-purpose computing on graphics processing units

General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, or less often GPGP) is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU), which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditionally handled by the central processing unit (CPU). The use of multiple video cards in one computer, or large numbers of graphics chips, further parallelizes the already parallel nature of graphics processing.

Distributed computing

A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another. Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. The components of a distributed system interact with one another in order to achieve a common goal. Three significant challenges of distributed systems are: maintaining concurrency of components, overcoming the lack of a global clock, and managing the independent failure of components.

Integrated circuit design

Integrated circuit design, or IC design, is a sub-field of electronics engineering, encompassing the particular logic and circuit design techniques required to design integrated circuits, or ICs. ICs consist of miniaturized electronic components built into an electrical network on a monolithic semiconductor substrate by photolithography. IC design can be divided into the broad categories of digital and analog IC design. Digital IC design is to produce components such as microprocessors, FPGAs, memories (RAM, ROM, and flash) and digital ASICs.

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