ECEN 6013 — Computer-Aided Design Techniques for VLSI

Fall 2003

Instructor 	Sunil P Khatri
Office:		ECOT432
Phone/Fax:	5-1962
E-mail:		spkhatri@colorado.edu
Class time  :   MW   6:00pm  - 715pm 
Office Hours:	W    10:00am - 12:00noon
		or by appointment

Course Objective

The course will cover several important topics pertaining to Design Automation for VLSI. These topics will be chosen from the areas of logic as well as physical design automation. The goal of this course is to familiarize students with analytical and practical techniques to perform VLSI routing, partitioning, timing analysis and simulation, fault simulation, automatic test generation and technology mapping. Recent research developments in these areas will be covered.

Another goal of this class is to get the students familiar with one of these topics in great detail. This will be achieved by a class project (in lieu of a final exam) in which the student will analyze and develop a software tool related to one of the topics of the class.

Prerequisites

Graduate standing, with some previous course or practical experience in VLSI devices and logic design. If you dont meet the requisites and are still very interested in the class, please see me. A typical EE Bachelors degree would usually meet these requirements.

Course Outline

	Circuit Simulation
	Logic Simulation
	Fault Simulation
	Timing Analysis 
	ATPG (Automatic Test Pattern Generation)
	Technology Mapping
	VLSI Routing techniques
	Circuit Partitioning
	Wave Pipelining
	Design Automation for Datapath Circuits
 
I may add new topics, time permitting.

Software Tools

The class project and possibly some homework assignments may involve hands-on use of SPICE (a circuit simulator), SPACE-3D (a 3-D parasitic extractor), SIS (a logic synthesis tool), OCTAVE (a Mathematica style tool) and VIS (a formal verification tool).

SPICE can be run on Linux systems, and SPACE-3D on Linux/Solaris/HP systems. SIS and VIS can be run on Linux systems and so can OCTAVE. You may also find that writing perl scripts may enable you to be productive while writing your software for class projects or homework assignments.

Students will be given accounts on machines in CU where these tools are installed. Additionally, if students want to install these tools on their own machines at home, instructions will be provided on this web-site. Most of these tools are NOT ported to Windows systems, and I will not be able to help if you plan to install these tools on such systems.

Textbooks

The class will be taught from notes which will be distributed on this website. These notes draw from several sources, and can be considered comprehensive. I dont expect to refer heavily to any single textbook, but if this does happen, I will post the name of this text on this site. I will post softcopies of papers that I refer to in creating the notes.

Homework, Exams, and Grading

             20% 4-6 Homework assignments.  
             40% 2 Mid-term assignments. 
             40% Research-oriented class project in lieu of final exam.
             The class project is one of the most important parts of
             this class. It will enable you to dive deeper into a
             particular topic from the class.

You are welcome to work together on homework, but you should not turn in identical solutions, or one solution for multiple students.

Mid-term exams will be open notes, open book etc.

If you have a class project in mind then please let me know. I will determine if the project is sufficiently interesting from a research standpoint, and we will discuss project deliverables together. Alternately, you can choose your project from a list of projects which I will distribute to the class about 45 days before the end of the semester.