Note: The following provides a suggested course description, objectives, and an outline. These may be modified pending discussion with the Faculty Chairs, proposing faculty, and other curriculum reviewers.

Course Description: This prototype course is offered by the author of the popular textbook "Digital Integrated Circuits" - A Design Perspective. It captures the spirit and the creativity of the book by focusing explicitly on the design aspect rather than analysis, and by highlighting the challenges and opportunities of digital integrated circuit design in the rapidly evolving technology scene of today. The material will cover CMOS devices and manufacturing technology along with CMOS inverters and gates. Other topics include propagation delay, noise margins, power dissipation, and sequential circuits. Students will look at various design styles and architectures as well as the issues that designers must face, such as technology scaling and the impact of interconnect. Examples presented in class include arithmetic circuits, semiconductor memories, and other novel circuits. The course will start with a detailed description and analysis of the core digital design block, the inverter. Implementations in CMOS will be discussed. Next, the design of more complex combinational gates such as NAND, NOR and EXORs will be discussed, looking at optimizing the robustness, speed, area, and/or power. The learned techniques will be applied on more evolved designs such as adders and multipliers. The influence of interconnect parasitics on circuit performance and approaches to cope with them are treated in detail. Substantial attention will then be devoted to sequential circuits, clocking approaches and memories. The course will conclude with an examination of design methodologies. CAD Tools for layout, extraction, and simulation will be used for assignments, labs and projects

Course Objectives: The objective of the course is to provide each student a strong foundation in the basics of digital integrated circuits design so that they are well-prepared for any advanced course in digital circuit design.

Course Outline by Topical Areas:

• Design Metrics; CMOS Inverter; MOS Transistor Model
• IC Manufacturing and Design Rules
• Voltage Transfer Characteristics; MOS Capacitances & Prop Delay
• Power Consumption & Technology Scaling; Wire Models
• Complementary CMOS; Logic Design; Complementary CMOS; Optimization
• Higher-level testing strategies
• Ratioed & Pass-transistor; Logic Design; Dynamic Circuits
• Low-energy Design; Sequential Circuits; Latches and Flip-flops; Multi-vibrators
• Interconnect - Capacitive; Interconnect - Resistive; Interconnect - Inductive
• Timing; Semiconductor Memory