Structured Hardware Design

Lecturer: Dr D.J. Greaves (djg@cl.cam.ac.uk)

No. of lectures: 8  

Industrial methodology.

Need and purpose of structured approach. Design team, alpha and beta prototypes, pcb team, procurement, interactions with foundry and component suppliers, production lines. FCC approvals. Contents of the CAE database. Revision control, stages of a module specification.

Specification and Representation.

Circuits, gates and flip-flops, Boolean algebra. Netlists: Hierarchical, flattened, top-level harness, leaf gates, HDL, schematic entry, VHDL, Verilog. Example libraries. Four-value logic system, bus resolution function. Masks, photoplots, Jedec fuse map.

Technology.

Boards and chips. Pad bound design, yield and optimum die size. Full custom, standard part, gatearray, standard cell, macrocells, PAL, FPGA. ECL, TTL, CMOS, speed-power product, net delay, clock speed, gate-count, density.

The Design Partition problem.

Modular design, standard interfaces and module reuse. When to use what. Detailed example: a host adaptor for the Cambridge Fast Ring.

Logic synthesis.

Synthesis goals: delay balance, operating frequency, area, power. Top down and bottom up optimisation. Instance optimisation problem and uniquify. D-type migration. Behavioural specification. Behavioural models for simulation. Synthesis from behavioural specification. Synthesis from formal specification.

Chip, board and system testing.

Stuck-at fault model, fault coverage and fault simulation. Linear Test vector format. Observability, test pins and test modes, boundary and register scan. Reusability of test programmes.

Design flow.

Entry, functional simulation, partition, place, route, back annotation, static timing analyser, test generation, parametric simulation, estimator tools, yes/no test wrappers, sign off, prototype, production, design lifetime.

Recommended books:

Katz, R.H. (1994). Contemporary Logic Design. Benjamin/Cummings.

Russell, G., Kinniment, D.J., Chester, E.G. & McLauchlan, M.R. (ed.) (1985). CAD for VLSI. Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Naish, P. & Bishop, P. (1988). Designing Asics. Ellis Horwood.

Rubin, S.M. (1987). Computer Aids for VLSI Design. Addison-Wesley.

Mavor, J., Jack, M.A. & Denyer, P. (1983). Introduction to MOS LSI Design. Addison-Wesley.

Weste, N.H.E. & Eshraghian, K. (1993). Principles of CMOS VLSI Design: A Systems Perspective. Addison-Wesley (2nd ed.).

Thomas, D.E. & Moorby, P. (1995). The Verilog Hardware Description Language. Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Sternheim, E., Singh, R., Madhaven, R. & Trivedi, Y. (1993). Digital Design and Synthesis with Verilog HDL. Automata.

Oldfield, J.V. & Dorf, R.C. (c1995). Field-Programmable Gate Arrays. Wiley.