Once upon a time, integrated circuits (ICs) were built by the same companies that designed them. The design of an IC was tightly integrated with the manufacturing processes available within each ...

Detailed and precise hierarchical design planning is essential to achieving closure on large designs. In this article we describe a new hierarchical design flow and its usage on a 3 million-gate chip.

As we all know, the back-end design of layout implementation known as integrated circuit (IC) layout — is simplistically divided into ASIC-style flow and full-custom flow. This article will try to ...

Process design kits consist of a set of files that typically contain descriptions of the basic building blocks of the process. They are expressed, algorithmically, as Pcells. These descriptions are ...

In analog layout design, precise layout matching techniques are crucial to ensure the accuracy and performance of the circuit so that transistors exhibit similar electrical properties (i.e.

With the information developed in Chapters 1 and 2, your next step is to utilize three time-tested tools to assess the efficiency of your existing layout and test proposed improvements. See Chapter 2 ...