EE116B

Design of VLSI Systems

Winter

2005

http://nesl.ee.ucla.edu/courses/ee116b/2005w

This course teaches digital VLSI and system-on-chip design, and is an elective course primarily targeted at computer engineering majors. The lectures build upon students’ prior knowledge of digital circuits, digital logic, and computer architecture to teach how complex chip-scale systems can be designed. The specific topics covered include (a) core VLSI architecture concepts such as datapath design, clocking, power-speed-area trade-offs, input/output, packaging, (b) behavioral, register-transfer, logic, and physical-level structured VLSI design using CAD tools and hardware description languages, and (c) additional topics such as design for testability, and hardware-software co-design. The concurrent labs make the students apply the concepts learnt in the lectures towards the design of actual VLSI subsystems from high level specifications, and culminates in a project involving the hardware-software design of a modest complexity chip all the way through specification, modeling, synthesis, and physical design. The team project is run as a competition targeting a design metric and involves a final public presentation of the results by the students to their peers in the class.