ECAD Topics

Lecturer: Dr P. Robinson (pr@cl.cam.ac.uk)

No. of lectures: 8

Prerequisite courses: Digital Electronics, Structured Hardware Design, Introduction to ECAD, VLSI  

Introduction.

Problems of scale.

A framework for electronic CAD.

Behavioural, functional and structural descriptions, implementation and product. Hardware description languages and data structures for circuits.

Simulation.

Event-driven simulation, circuit simulation, concurrent and deductive fault simulation. Test pattern generation, design for test.

Layout.

Data structures for layout. Placement, simulated annealing. Routing, Steiner trees, channel routing, routing by sorting, layer assignment by graph colouring. Layout editing. Verification, circuit extraction and graph matching.

Silicon compilation.

Recommended books:

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

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