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ELEC3285 Integrated Circuit Design
COMPUTER LABORATORY SESSIONS
Overview
This is intended to be a first of five face-to-face computer lab sessions There may be
7 mentioned in the catalogue – these are 2 extra potential surgery sessions, in which
you should learn how to use an example of a modern chip design and simulation
tool. The learning approach will be largely self-determined learning by using
screencasts and following these instruction sheets and using the associated
manual.pdf for reference.
The final assessment with be worth 30% of the module mark (completed as a series
of 4 personal mini E-Lab Book submissions, beginning after the week 2 session of
the lab. These will be based on use of the resources / links in your Class OneNote
CAD Lab Folder, and submitted by printing the relevant sections and pages to a pdf
in a personal folder and then uploading to Turnitin tool on the VLE. I suggest you
check this process (except for the Turnitin submission which you can do only once
for each journal entry) so you know how to capture everything that you have been
working on. This is your responsibility to get right with respect to the Turnitin
submission.
Using the usual guideline the 3 credits should involve between 20 and 40 hours of
your study time in total using the tool - and that should be sufficient to learn /
understand and use the tool to complete the associated tasks (for some this may
mean only 15 hours for others this could be the full 30-40hours) – but this is a big
component and the marks for this could offset any less good performance in the first
assessment.
The learning intention is that along the way you will employ what we have been
learning and gain a deeper appreciation of both the discipline of integrated circuit
design and with it a deeper appreciation of any related electronics and hardware that
underpins our modern society, which some refer to as the second machine age, or
the 4th industrial revolution.
I particularly favour the former with the first being where humans learnt how to
harness greater and greater mechanical power (advantage) and all the leverage that
that has given to constructing ever larger and more complex (Mega-) structures, and
machines, then in the last 60 or so years we’ve harnessed intellectual and
computational power (the “thinking” advantage) giving us unparalleled access to
information and computational capability to greatly extend our understanding and
control of the world around us, especially for massive and incredibly complex
problems, in this new geological epoch referred to as the Anthropocene.
The computing and associated Bio-tech tools and modelling (computer resources)
underpinning the human genome project, led to the genetic sequencing and vaccine
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development that helped us out of the global pandemic and averted population
collapse that arguably came with similar global pandemics.
To succeed with this CAD design work I’d encourage you to spend a series of one or
two hour sessions on your own on top of the timetabled classes exploring and using
the software (which should be accessible elsewhere on campus – and on your laptop
provided you have already a short-cut on your laptop via apps anywhere and have
pulse secure (VPN) running, and I would rather you take your time individually to
think about what’s really going on with the tool and to learn how to use the tool
efficiently?
This is not a fully functioning professional design tool (which typically might cost
£20k- 30k/seat!) but it is still a powerful design environment enabling hierarchical
design of semi-custom or fully custom application specific integrated circuits, and
shares many of the capabilities with industry standard tools such as Synopsys,
Cadence IC, Mentor Graphics (which collectively are referred to as Electronic design
automation (EDA) tools (or whatever these have morphed into these days) but is
much less complex to learn and use. Incidentally a senior EDA Engineer (probably
with about 10-15 yrs experience or those professional tools) can easily earn 60-
80k/yr in the UK or equivalent elsewhere!
Initially, you should follow the instructions given in each of the accompanying sets of
lab sheets, and this work will culminate in your submitting your own independent
reports and simulation results on a weekly journal.
This year, to ease the assessment burden on yourselves and to help you focus on
using the tool to explore transistor and logic gate design and switching behaviour
rather than on report writing, you will complete an outline report-proforma in the form
of filling in some spaces and comment boxes and adding your own figures and
“measured” data. Maximum marks will be given for correct work and clear and
concise use of graphs and tabulated data and insightful comments. Any one free-text
discussion / answer should require no more than 100-400 words and associated
small tables and illustrations / figures to support your answers.
The first component / Lab session will be a training exercise to learn to use the
software to study the layout and the “switching” of some simple transistors and logic
gates, and to help you begin to understand some of Microwind and DSCH's features
and functionality. The first Journal should be submitted at the end of week 2 of the
lab (12pm Fri 15th March) followed by another at the end of week 3 (12pm Fri 22nd
March)and then the remaining 2 when you restart after the Easter break.
By the end of this first stage, you should have viewed any screencasts and be able
to:
a) Understand some of the capabilities and constraints of chip layout and
simulation tools (Microwind and its sister tool DSCH). Some of the constraints
may seem frustrating but often hide an underlying logic protecting the designer
as they work from breaking some of the technology dependent (foundry) design
rules.
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b) You will begin to see how the transistor layout information, underlying
technology choices and logic gates can be exported and analysed in SPICE
(Simulation Package with Integrated Circuit Emphasis). To see the
consequences of design choices on the switching behaviour of the logic. How
Spice net-lists and Verilog files can be exported and input allowing the
movement up and down the design hierarchy in terms of abstract or physical
levels, and begin to appreciate what the different terms and structures mean. –
You will probably need to look to the web and my lectures for the information
and resources to properly explore and understand these aspects.
c) You will be able to use Microwind and DSCH to set up and analyse simple
transistor circuits and logic gates and explore/evaluate their behaviour and
functionality.
d) Be better placed and ready to use Microwind and DSCH to analyse more
complex circuits.
Over the course of this computer aided design work, you will have a number of tasks
to complete. I’d recommend you independently open and add your simulation results
and conclusions to a word document or your own draft Electronic Lab-book in your
Class OneNote folder as you go through and complete the tasks and questions.
Then you can copy and paste to you final document and then print the sections to a
.PDF document – this is just good practice and will help you complete the pieces of
work which will be assessed.
Your answers to the various questions can be informed by any suitable web source,
book, research paper, or lecture notes, but please do not cut and paste material
from any of these sources – this information should only be used to support your
understanding / learning, for obvious reasons you should not just simply copy or
paraphrase the information, even if you do reference their origin.
At several points, you may wish to include an appropriate screenshot from the
software (windows flag-key+shift+S keys in Windows 10), but remember that there is
some skill required in preparing the figure and adding labels, numbers and axes so
as to convey your work, and you must also explain the basics of any graphs,
tables or illustrations to the reader – this can be done in <50 words and is just
good practice as a professional engineer, and one you should get in the habit of
doing, to explain to the reader the reason for presenting the illustration, as well as
summarising the important details of the illustration, along with any trends and
subtleties (which is where the illustration or graphic really comes into its own in
supporting your discussion). These general skills and practice should have been
developed already, and should also help you to effectively report on the other work
you did on your individual projects.
You should use these exercises to cement (develop these reporting skills to a high
order) to practice presenting good informative graphs or annotated screen-shots.
Please label your answers with numbers (so you can refer back to any figure if you
need to later in your document), and ensure that all pasted figures have captions
explaining what they are showing.
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This first set of hurdles is intended to teach you some of the basic skills necessary in
analysing circuits using Microwind and DSCH. Later components will be more open-
ended, to give you a chance to explore some aspects of the software in more detail.
Tasks to complete in the first phase of the exercise.
1) Introduction
Please use the manual.pdf for Microwind, which is provided on the VLE under the
CAD Exercises & Materials heading. I strongly recommend you create a Word®
document or OneNote draft document, and regularly save screenshots and brief
observations to this document as you move through the tasks.
In the past Microwind has shut-down unexpectedly, and this problem is likely to
happen again as there remains an issue with the floating license, i.e. a latency in the
call and response with the license manager and program set up, and which we have
been struggling to debug / fix. Basically the program is designed as a stand-alone
tool and doesn’t play well over a networked license server – a new version for the
class is £10-15k but there’s no reason to expect it to be all that different license
manager wise. It may be possible for me to negotiate personal time limited copies
that you can download but the supporters for this are based in India and I think this
package (Microwind) is only a very small part of the software that they sell / support..
To access the software it is best to use one of the university’s wired computers and
apps anywhere: (some of this is hard for me to check because I don’t see things the
way a student registration does – so please email me if you have any problems).