02-02-2012, 02:50 PM
Modern VLSI Design
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Preface to the Fourth Edition
I set for myself two goals in producing this fourth edition of Modern VLSI Design. First, I wanted to
update the book for more modern technologies and design methods. This includes obvious changes like
smaller design rules. But it also includes emphasizing more system-level topics such as IP-based
design. Second, I wanted to continue to improve the book’s treatment of the fundamentals of logic
design. VLSI is often treated as circuit design, meaning that traditional logic design topics like
pipelining can easily become lost.
In between the third and fourth editions of this book, I respun the third edition as FPGA-Based System
Design. That book added new FPGA-oriented material to material from Modern VLSI Design. In this
edition, I’ve decided to borrow back some material from the FPGA book. The largest inclusion was the
section on sequential system performance. I had never been happy with my treatment of that material.
After 10 years of trying, I came up with a more acceptable description of clocking and timing in the
FPGA book and I am now bringing it back to VLSI. I included material on busses, Rent’s Rule,
pipelining, and hardware description languages. I also borrowed some material on FPGAs themselves to
flesh out that treatment from the third edition. An increasing number of designs include FPGA fabrics to
add flexibility; FPGAs also make good design projects for VLSI classes. Material on IP-based design is
presented at several levels of hierarchy: gates, subsystems, and architecture.
As part of this update, I eliminated the CAD chapter from this edition because I finally decided that
such detailed treatment of many of the CAD tools is not strictly necessary. I also deleted the chapter on
chip design.
Preface to the Second Edition
Every chapter in this second edition of Modern VLSI Design has been updated to reflect the challenges
looming in VLSI system design. Today’s VLSI design projects are, in many cases, mega-chips which
not only contain tens (and soon hundreds) of millions of transistors, but must also run at very high
frequencies. As a result, I have emphasized circuit design in a number of ways: the fabrication chapter
spends much more time on transistor characteristics; the chapter on gate design covers a wider variety
of gate designs; the combinational logic chapter enhances the description of interconnect delay and adds
an important new section on crosstalk; the sequential logic chapter covers clock period determination
more thoroughly; the subsystems chapter gives much more detailed descriptions of both multiplication
and RAM design; the floorplanning chapter spends much more time on clock distribution.
Beyond being large and fast, modern VLSI systems must frequently be designed for low power
consumption. Low-power design is of course critical for battery-operated devices, but the sheer size of
these VLSI systems means that excessive power consumption can lead to heat problems. Like testing,
low-power design cuts across all levels of abstraction, and you will find new sections on low power
throughout the book.
The reader familiar with the first edition of this book will notice that the combinational logic material
formerly covered in one chapter (Chapter 3) has been split into two chapters, one of logic gates and
another on combinational networks. This split was the result of the great amount of material added on
circuit design added to the early chapters of the book. Other, smaller rearrangements have also been
made in the book, hopefully aiding clarity.
Why Design Integrated Circuits?
This book describes design methods for integrated circuits. That may
seem like a specialized topic. But, in fact, integrated circuit (IC) technology
is the enabling technology for a whole host of innovative devices
and systems that have changed the way we live. Jack Kilby and Robert
Noyce received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention of
the integrated circuit; without the integrated circuit, neither transistors
nor computers would be as important as they are today. VLSI systems
are much smaller and consume less power than the discrete components
used to build electronic systems before the 1960s. Integration allows us
to build systems with many more transistors, allowing much more computing
power to be applied to solving a problem. Integrated circuits are
also much easier to design and manufacture and are more reliable than
discrete systems; that makes it possible to develop special-purpose systems
that are more efficient than general-purpose computers for the task
at hand.
Integrated Circuit Manufacturing
Integrated circuit technology is based on our ability to manufacture
huge numbers of very small devices—today, more transistors are manufactured
in California each year than raindrops fall on the state. In this
section, we briefly survey VLSI manufacturing
