Instructor:
Prof. Gert Cauwenberghs
Barton Hall, Room 209
gert@bach.ece.jhu.edu
Teaching Assistants:
Mr. Roman Genov, Barton 400B, roman@bach.ece.jhu.edu
Mr. Srinadh Madhavapeddi, Barton 03, srinadh@bach.ece.jhu.edu
Office hours during lab sessions or by appointment.
This is a hands-on laboratory course where you will learn to design, layout, and test simple microelectronic circuits. We won't get as far as building a complex system like the 1200-MIPS/600-MFlops, 9.3 Million transistor DEC Alpha processor, but you will learn some essential skills to do so! It is assumed you are familiar with basic electronic devices and circuits. Integrated Electronics I (520.325) is a prerequisite of this course.
You will learn to use CAD tools to simulate, layout, and verify integrated circuits, and acquire the instrumentation skills necessary to prototype, test and characterize simple integrated circuits. The final project is the design and layout of a small-scale integrated circuit, that will be fabricated.
If you like this course and want to continue with a more advanced senior-level VLSI design course, you can take 520.448, Advanced Electronics Design Lab, that will be offered next semester.
The course has three components.
Part I: A set of laboratory exercises that introduce the students to the basics of integrated circuit design: circuit simulation, layout, extraction, and verification. Some knowledge of personal computers and Matlab will be necessary. Most of these laboratory exercises could be done at home on your own computers if you buy the text book, which comes with the student version of the CAD software.
Part II: A set of laboratory exercises that are aimed at providing you with the basic experimental techniques for testing integrated electronic circuits and analyzing the results. These include instrumentation design, MOS and bipolar transistor parameter extraction and simulation, and MOS amplifiers.
Part III: This third component involves a class design project: VLSI design of an integrating imager chip with random addressing, including layout and simulation. This project will be fabricated using support that is provided by the National Science Foundation.
In the laboratory you will work in small groups and therefore, you are allowed to
discuss your work with others. However, pre-laboratory exercises must be prepared
individually, and are due before the lab starts in your section
. Lab
reports, one per group, are due one week later, at the next lab meeting in your
section. You will not receive credit for a lab report if you were not present to
participate in the corresponding lab session. Late reports and exercises lose 50% of the grade; no
points will be given to reports more than one week late. The midterm is hands-on,
individual, and covers the use of the CAD tools and the instrumentation, as well as
design of basic MOS circuit blocks.
Lectures: Barton 123 (ECE lab), Wed 2-3pm.
Laboratory sections: Barton 123, Thu (sect. 1) or Fri (sect. 2) 1-4:30pm.
The text-book is ``Physical Design of CMOS Integrated Circuits Using L-Edit,'' J.P. Uyemura, and is available in the bookstore. You don't have to buy the book, but I strongly encourage you to do so. It will be so much easier for you to do the work in the class.
Each year, we strive to improve our laboratory course curriculum based on experience and student feedback in previous years, which has incurred a considerable effort by several people in the department: Prof. Andreou, who taught 520.348 last year; the TA's in previous years who spent more time than required; student volunteers like Philippe Pouliquen and Mark Martin; and the department staff (Tom, Mike, ...). The department recently upgraded some of the test stations and computers, and major upgrades of the lab are underway. This year again, your comments to the quality of the course are very much appreciated (send E-mail to gert@bach.ece.jhu.edu).
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