VLSI Physical Design and

Design Automation

 Basic VLSI design methodologies.

 Algorithmic graph theory and computational complexity.
 Tractable and intractable problems.
 Combinatorial optimization.
 Layout compaction.
 Placement and partitioning.
 Floor planning.
 Routing.
 Simulation.
 Logic synthesis and verification.
 High-level synthesis.
 VLSI
Design
VLSI, or Very Large Scale Integration refers to a
technology through which it is possible to
implement large circuits in silicon - circuits with
up to a million transistors. The VLSI technology
has been successfully used to build
microprocessors, signal processors, systolic
arrays, large capacity memories, memory
controllers, I/0 controllers, and interconnection
networks.
VLSI Design: Example

 The Intel 80286 microprocessor has over

100,000 transistors, the 80386 has 275,000
transistors, the 80486 has approximately
1000,000 transistors. The RISC processor
from National Semiconductor NS32SF641
has over a million transistors. The Pentium of
Intel has over three million transistors
Computer Aided Design
 Designing a VLSI chip with the help of computer programs is
known as CAD, or Computer Aided Design.
 Design Automation (DA), on the other hand, refers to entirely
computerized design process with no or very little human
intervention.
 Some of the earliest CAD software dealt with placement of logic
modules on printed circuit boards (PCBs) and finding short
electrical paths to wire the interconnections.
 Logic minimization was also an important facet of electronic
design, since eliminating even a handful of logic gates resulted in
significant cost savings.
Change of Design Issue
 The rapidly changing technology has also radically
transformed design issues.
 For instance, in the LSI/VLSI technologies, it is not
very important to save on transistors; the cost
reduction through logic minimization is unlikely to be
significant when the total number of transistors is in
the order of a million.
 On the other hand, it is important to save on
interconnection costs, since wires are far more
expensive in VLSI than transistors.
Architectural design

Architectural design of a chip is carried out by expert human engineers. Decisions

made at this stage affect the cost and performance of the design significantly.
Several examples of decisions made during the architectural design of a
microprocessor are given below.
(a) What should be the instruction set of the processor? What memory addressing
modes should be supported? Should the instruction set be compatible with that of
another microprocessor available in the market?
(b) Should instruction pipelining be employed? If so, what should be the depth of
the pipeline?
(c) Should the processor be provided with an on-chip cache? How big should the
cache memory be? What should be the organization of the cache? Should
instruction cache be separated from data cache?
(d) Should the arithmetic unit be designed as a bit-serial unit or as a bit-parallel
unit? If bit-serial arithmetic is used, one saves on hardware cost but loses on
performance.
(e) How will the processor interface to the external world? Are there any
international standards to be met?
 Once the system architecture is defined, it is necessary to carry out two
things:
(a) Detailed logic design of individual circuit modules.
(b) Derive the control signals necessary to activate and deactivate the
circuit modules

.The first step is known as data path design. The second step is called control
path design. The data path of a circuit includes the various functional blocks,
storage elements, and hardware components to allow transfer of data among
functional blocks and storage elements. Examples of functional blocks are adders,
multipliers, and other arithmetic/logic units. Examples of storage elements are shift
registers, random access memories, buffers, stacks, and queues. Data transfer is
achieved using tristate busses or a combination of multiplexers and
demultiplexers.
The control path of a circuit generates the various control signals necessary to
operate the circuit. Control signals are necessary to initialize the storage elements
in the circuit, to initiate data transfers among functional blocks and storage
elements, and so on. The control path may be implemented using hardwired
control (random logic) or through microprogrammed control.
hardware Synthesis & High-Level
Synthesis

Given a specification the objective is to arrive at a

design which meets all the constraints posed by the
specification, and optimizes on one or more of the
design aspects. This problem is also known as
hardware Synthesis.
Computer programs have been developed for data path
synthesis as well control path synthesis. The automatic
generation of data path and control path is known
High-Level Synthesis
Logic Design

The data path and control path (derived automatically

or manually) will have components such as
arithmetic/logic units, shift registers, multiplexers,
buffers, and so on. Further design steps depend on the
following factors.
(1) How is the circuit to be implemented, on a PCB or
as a VLSI chip?
(2) Are all the components readily available as off-the-
shelf integrated circuits or as pre-designed modules?
macro-cells
 If the circuit must be implemented on a printed-circuit board
using off-the shelf components, then the next stage in design is
to select the components so as to minimize the total cost and at
the same time maximize the performance.
 Following the selection procedure, the IC chips are placed on
one or more circuit boards and the necessary interconnections
are established using one or more layers of metal deposits. A
similar procedure may be used in case the circuit must be
implemented on a VLSI chip using pre-designed circuit
components from a module library. The pre-designed modules
are also known as macro-cells. The cells must be placed on the
layout surface and wired together using metal and polysilicon
(poly) interconnections.
Physical Design & Automation

 Physical design of an integrated circuit refers

to the process of generating the final layout
for the circuit.
 Needless to say, physical design is of vital
importance, and design automation research
has gone into developing efficient algorithms
for automating the layout process.