Engineering Commons^™

Automating Variation And Repeater Analysis In Physical Design Of Integrated Circuits, Subrat Mahalik

Dissertations and Theses

Rapid advancement and innovation in semiconductor research have continuously helped in designing efficient and complex integrated circuits in miniature size. As the device technology, is aggressively scaling to improve the device performance, the issues related to device interconnects, power, and reliability have become a major concern for the designers. These challenges make the design and validation of ASIC extremely complicated.

The primary idea of this work is to develop automation tools, to be used in the physical design flows to improve the efficiency of the design flow. The first tool named as variation analysis tool automates the on-chip variation modeling …

Evaluation Of Data-Path Topologies For Self-Timed Conditional Statements, Navaneeth Prasannakumar Jamadagni

Dissertations and Theses

This research presents a methodology to evaluate data path topologies that implement a conditional statement for an average-case performance that is better than the worst-case performance. A conditional statement executes one of many alternatives depending on how Boolean conditions evaluate to true or false. Alternatives with simple computations take less time to execute. The self-timed designs can exploit the faster executing alternatives and provide an average-case behavior, where the average depends on the frequency of simple and complex computations, and the difference in the completion times of simple and complex computations. The frequency of simple and complex computations depends on …

Rtl Power Estimation Of Sequential Circuits, Sridhar Muthrasanallur

Dissertations and Theses

Power consumption has become a major concern in the electronic industry in recent years because of the increased demand for portable electronic devices. Part of the problem in power conscious design is accurate power estimation. Power estimation at low-levels of design abstraction is slow since the units of low-levels of design abstraction are transistors or gates. But designers need reliable power estimates early in the design process. Therefore designers need to have tools for fast and accurate power estimation at higher levels of design abstraction such as the Register Transfer Level (RTL).

This thesis introduces a new method for RTL …

Design Of A Second-Order Filter Using The GM-C Technique, Girish Chandrasekaran

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis deals with the design, layout, fabrication, testing and characterization of a second-order filter (biquad) using the transconductance-C (g_m-C) technique. The biquad was designed to realize the four filter functions - lowpass, highpass, bandpass and notch - by appropriate choice of input and output terminals and element values. The tunable range of frequencies for the biquad was designed to be 18-59MHz. The quality factor of the biquad was designed to be tunable from approximately 1/3 to 3. The filter was designed in LEVEL2 SPICE, laid out using MAGIC, and the circuit was fabricated using MOSIS's …

Layout Synthesis For Datapath Designs, Naveen Buddi

Dissertations and Theses

As datapath chips such as microprocessors and digital signal processors become more complex, efficient CAD tools that preserve the regularity of datapath designs and result in small layout area are required. The standard-cell placement techniques ignore the regularity of datapath designs and hence give inefficient layouts. This has necessitated the development of new techniques for datapath module placement. We developed a layout synthesis tool DataPathLAYOUT, for the bit-slice datapath logic designed using standard-cell libraries. We developed fast and area efficient heuristics for placing the cells in a bit-slice such that the regularity of datapath circuits is preserved and the number …

The Evaluation Of Device Model Dependence In The Design Of A High-Frequency, Analog, Cmos Transconductance-C Filter, Susan Rose Brotman

Dissertations and Theses

It is important to have the ability to predict the effects of device model variation when designing integrated transconductance-C type active filters. Applying these filters to integrated circuit design has become increasingly popular due to its ease of implementation in monolithic form. With the introduction of fully automated design tools, predictable behavior of high-level variables becomes still more important. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the process parameter spread of analog device models to determine the effect on the design parameters of an active filter. This information's significant contribution directly effects the feasibility and realization of automating analog …

High-Frequency Analog Voltage Converter Design, Ping Xu

Dissertations and Theses

For many high-speed, high-performance circuits, purely differential inputs are needed. This project focuses on building high-speed voltage converters which can transfer a single-ended signal to a purely differential signal, or a differential input signal to a single-ended signal. Operational transconductance amplifier (OTAs) techniques are widely used in high-speed continuous-time integrated analog signal processing (ASP) circuits because resistors, inductors, integrators, buffers, multipliers and filters can be built by OT As and capacitors. Taking advantage of OT As, very-high-speed voltage converters are designed in CMOS technology. These converters can work in a frequency range from DC (OHz) up to lOOMHz and higher, …