Book Reviews
Nanoelectronic Mixed-Signal
I
present to the readers of IEEE Con-
sumer Electronics Magazine the
award-winning textbook Nanoelec-
tronic Mixed-Signal System Design.
This 800-page authoritative text from
Saraju P. Mohanty received the 2016
Professional and Scholarly Excellence
Award for Best Textbook in Physical
Sciences and Mathematics from the
Association of American Publishers.
All consumer electronics (CE) today
contain very sophisticated processing
cores, which are implemented as sys-
tems-on-chip (SoCs) using nanoelec-
tronic technologies. These SoCs are, by
necessity, mixed-signal integrated cir-
cuits (ICs): they contain powerful
­digital signal processing and comput-
ing portions along with interfacing
­circuitry and analog and radio frequen-
cy front and back ends. The designer of
SoCs with a CE target will find this
book invaluable.
There are many senior- and graduate-
level textbooks centered on traditional
digital very-large-scale integration
(VLSI) design. The topic is robust, mature,
and has been taught for decades. In par-
allel, there is a much smaller popu­
lation of texts focused on analog IC
design with an emphasis on designing
specific modules, such as amplifiers,
analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog
converters, receivers, transmitters, fil-
ters, and other esoteric topics. Absent
from the latter category of textbooks
are the discussions of system-centered
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2016.2614559
Date of publication: 14 December 2016
System Design
By Elias Kougianos
analog design geared toward integration
into an SoC.
The intersection of these two de­­­
sign disciplines is commonly known as
mixed-signal or analog/mixed-signal
(AMS) design, a topic that has received
very little attention. There are only a
handful of books on the subject, usually
at very advanced levels; most are collec-
tions of loosely connected chapters or
papers. This dearth of information is at
odds with the fact that all IC design these
days is AMS by virtue of the design
methodologies developed and the sys-
tems themselves: pure digital systems,
even though still tremendously useful for
computation, do not reflect daily usage
of commodity electronics dictated by our
connected society.
Nanoelectronic Mixed-Signal Sys-
tem Design abundantly fills this niche
area by covering a vast array of topics
related to AMS IC design. The book
january 2017
covers the entire spectrum of modern
IC technologies from the design and
simulation point of view, starting at
the schematic level and progressing
through to actual physical design,
including postlayout simulation and
design optimization, always with a sys-
tems emphasis. The audience for this
massive and authoritative treatise
includes those interested in AMS IC
design, particularly at the nano level,
and the book also addresses the needs
of everyone in that scope: college
seniors, master’s and Ph.D. students as
well as practicing engineers, designers,
and computer-aided design developers.
It can be used both as a text and refer-
ence book at the same time, since it
covers an immense amount of state-of-
the-art material.
Mohanty is a professor of computer
science and engineering at the Univer-
sity of North Texas in Denton and is the
founder of a laboratory dedicated to the
subject of nanoelectronic AMS IC
design, the Nano-System Design Labo-
ratory. In addition to serving as the
The book covers the entire
spectrum of modern IC
technologies from the
design and simulation
point of view, starting at
the schematic level and
progressing through to
actual physical design.
^ IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine 147
 ­e ditor-in-chief of IEEE Consumer
Electronics Magazine, he has published
over 200 articles on the subject and has
coauthored or edited six other books,
mostly in the same area. He has over
15 years of undergraduate and graduate
teaching experience in the United
States, and it shows in the student-
friendly structure, organization, and
presentation of the book. As the author
mentions in the preface (p. xxiii), “The
author’s objective is to provide nanoelec-
tronic VLSI design training requiring
the shortest possible learning curve.”
This objective is accomplished admira-
bly in the book.
At a very large 8.5 in × 11-in page
size and nearly 800 pages of dense
text, combined with hundreds of fig-
ures, diagrams, plots, and over 1,000
references, there is very little not cov-
ered on the subject. The use of the
terms comprehensive, massive, and
treatise to describe this book is entire-
ly justified. It has 12 chapters, includ-
ing a very useful eight-page table of
acronyms and a four-page table of
symbols. Each chapter is concluded by
a large number of questions, and the
references section (organized by chap-
ter) is extremely comprehensive. In
fact, master’s and Ph.D. students plan-
ning to do a literature review for their
theses and dissertations would benefit
enormously by starting at the relevant
chapter bibliography.
Although not formally divided into
sections, the book covers four wide topic
areas. The first area, consisting of
C hapters 1–3, provides a general
­ will be of great help to those trying to
­overview of the subject. Specifically,
Chapter 1 discusses state-of-the-art nano-
electronic technology. Chapter 2 provides
numerous examples of nanoelectronic
systems used in consumer electronics
and provides justification for the need of
a paradigm shift when studying the sub-
ject. Chapter 3 introduces the subject
gently by providing a high-level over-
view of the design process.
The second topic area, covered in
Chapters 4–7, gets into the heart of
what comprises a nanoelectronic
148 IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine ^ january 2017
The last topic area offers a
unique perspective to
­variability-aware,
­surrogate model-based
design methodologies, an
area where Mohanty
has published extensively
and is recognized as one
of the major contributors
on the subject.
system: its constituent com­ponents and
subsystems. Chapter 4 discusses oscil-
lators and phase-locked loops. This
chapter by itself can serve as a general
introduction to the subject. Coupled
with the more than 100 references
ci­ted in this chapter, it becomes a true
­re­­­­­­­­­­ference work. Chapter 5 covers ana-
log-to-digital and digital-to-analog con-
version, the primary interface elements
of a mixed-signal system. Chapter 6
provides an extensive survey of sensors
both at the circuit and system level.
Finally, Chapter 7 rounds up the system
component concentration by describ-
ing all major memory types used in
today’s systems.
The third topic area is mixed-signal
system design, simulation, and postlay-
out resimulation. Chapter 8 is an excel-
lent tutorial for mixed-signal system
design and attempts to “lucidly discuss
all the steps.” This particular chapter
understand the jargon of modern IC
design. Chapter 9 covers simulation
from all possible viewpoints: transistor-
level continuous-time SPICE analysis,
discrete-event behavioral simulation
using hardware description languages,
and the commonly used mixed frame-
works that incorporate both types of
simulation. Unique to this chapter is
the inclusion of the very popular
­MATLAB and Simulink frameworks
for exploratory system space explora-
tion using novel and untested technolo-
gies. Chapter 10 reexamines the subject
covered in Chapter 8, circuit and sys-
tem simulation, but from the physical
point of view. Parasitic effects and
power and thermal issues are discussed
in depth.
The last topic area, covered in Chap-
ters 11 and 12, offers a unique perspective
to what I consider to be the future of
AMS simulation: variability-aware, surro-
gate model-based design methodologies,
an area where Mohanty has published
extensively and is recognized as one of
the major contributors on the subject.
Chapter 11 analyzes techniques that have
been used to address variability inclusion
in the design, simulation, and design opti-
mization stages. Along with Monte Carlo
and similar stochastic techniques, the
very recently introduced biologically
inspired methods are examined. Chapter
12 integrates the whole book by examin-
ing complex systems, analyzed through
the methodologies already presented in
previous chapters and modeled using
metamodeling approaches, such as poly-
nomial and neural network models and
the novel concepts of K ­ riging as applied
to this field, one of the unique scholarly
contributions of the author.
On the whole, the book succeeds in
addressing the vast array of topics com-
prising the subject matter in a very
approachable, intuitive, and clear man-
ner. Students, practitioners, and instruc-
tors will find this book an invaluable
resource for reference and teaching.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Elias Kougianos (eliask@unt.edu)
earned his Ph.D. degree in electrical
engineering from Louisiana State Uni-
versity in 1997. He is a professor in
electrical engineering technology at the
University of North Texas. Prior to
joining academia, he had a successful
15-year industrial career as an integrat-
ed circuit designer and computer-aided
design developer with companies such
as Texas Instruments, Inc., Cadence
Design Systems, Inc., and Avant! (now
Synopsys). He is a Senior Member of
the IEEE.