AIMS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

The course aims at developing knowledge and skills related to the design of digital integrated circuits. In particular, in the first phase of the course, students are provided with basic knowledge relating to all the macro-phases of design, from the definition of requirements to serial production. The course then focuses in detail on the following aspects:

1) design of the fundamental parts of a digital integrated circuit such as the control path and the data path.

2) functional verification in the front end phase of the design of a digital integrated circuit through state-of-the-art techniques used in the industrial field

TEACHING METHODS

frontal teaching lectures

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

1. Overview: from spec to serial production
   1. Quick discussion of IC definition phases
   2. Requirements
   3. Digital Design flow and terminology
      1. (Front-End / Back End / DFT/ Manufacturing / Test / Packaging / Carachterization / Qualification )
   4. Tools and equipments for the  various phases
   5. Investments/Cost/Critical points
2. Design Flow (6h: covers the typical design flows used in digital design, with detailed description of each phase of the flow and a complete flow example from RTL to GDSII)
3. Module/top level flow, examples
4. Control Path design (4h: covers the techniques to manage the fundamental signals and resynchronization problems in digital design)
5. Clocks and resets
6. Synchronizers and metastability
7. FIFO architecture
8. Data Path Design (4h: describes the fixed point 2’s complement numbering systems and how to perform mathematical operations on digital signals, together with digital filter design and implementation)
9. Basic DSP concepts
10. Digital filter design: IIR, FIR, LMS
11. Low power design (2h: covers the main techniques used to save power and create power efficient digital designs)
12. Low power design techniques,
13. power regioning, UPF/CPF flows
14. Advanced DSP (6h: introduces advanced  digital signal processing techniques and their implementation)
15. Multi rate filtering, CIC
16. Parallel processing
17. FFT/IFFT
18. FFT implementation
19. Adaptive filtering and system examples (2h: describes adaptive filtering and how all the different techniques studied are used in different systems)
20. LMS techniques & adaptive filtering
21. System examples, high speed DSP
22. Functional Verification
    1. What is why it is done where it is done with reference to item 1.3 above
    2. Traditional approach  VS Constrained Random Coverage Driven Verification
    3. Methodology: Functional Verification basics
       1. Verification Plan
       2. Verification Environment:
          1. Driving 
          2. Coverage 
          3. Monitoring
       3. Top Level TB -- Verification Environment and DUT
    4.  Main System Verilog commands used in the above basic tasks
       1. Interface
       2. Classes
       3. Fork- Join
       4. Coverage Commands
       5. System Verilog Assertions
    5. System Verilog Verification Environment: a simple example
    6. UVM Methodology basics. An introduction

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

Slides provided by the teachers