Neil H.E. Weste and David Harris
CMOS VLSI Design: A Circuits and Systems Perspectives, 3ed.,
Softcover, pp. 967, plus XXIV, $ 58.99
Pearson Education, Inc., Addison Wesley, Boston, 2005
ISBN 0-321-26977-2
http://www.pearsoneduc.com

In general about the book

The semiconductor electronics industry has achieved an explosive growth over the last few decades since the invention of monolithic integrated circuits (ICs) in the early 1960's. This progress is a direct consequence of rapid advances in information technologies and large-scale system design. The use of ICs in high-performance computing, telecommunications, and consumer electronics has been growing at a very fast pace. A number of different IC fabrication technologies are available to us. Because of its intrisinic feature in low-power consumption, low noise margins, and ease of design, CMOS emerged as the dominant VLSI IC technology and can be regarded as the main driver for semiconductor device scaling. Nowadays, CMOS VLSI ICs are widely used to develop RAM chips, microprocessor chips, digital signal processor chips, application specific integrated circuits, and system-on-chip design solutions. The continuous introduction of new VLSI CMOS products with the enhanced performance, smaller feature sizes, lower energy consumption per binary transition, faster transistor switching speed, and lower cost has revolutionized the existing market as well as created new commercial opportunities with intention to further dominate the market.

This book teaches the fundamental principles and modern techniques for design of complex and high-performance CMOS VLSI ICs. It emphasizes the design of circuits and explains how circuits are implemented in real chip starting from the digital system level to the circuit level. The book has twelve chapters, two appendices, References with 508 entries, and an Index.

Chapter content

The book is organized as follows:

Chapter 1 (Introduction, pp. 1-66) gives a simplified view of CMOS transistor in terms of its operation as an ideal switch. The principles of designing simple CMOS IC are discussed. MIPS microprocessor architecture is involved.

Chapter 2 (MOS Transistor Theory, pp. 67-111) concentrates on development of first-order current-voltage (I-V) and capacitance-voltage (C-V) models for MOS transistor that are used to predict the transfer characteristic of CMOS inverters, and looks at second-order effects that are important to power consumption and circuit reliability.

Chapter 3 (CMOS Processing Technology, pp. 113-156) starts with a summary of CMOS processing technology. In the rest of the text, interesting details concerning layout design rules, CMOS process enhancements, technology-related CAD issues, and manufacturing issues are presented.

Chapter 4 (Circuit Characterization and Performance Estimation, pp 157-271) covers performance estimation for circuits in order to explain why some circuits are better than others. The crucial issues considered in this chapter relate to delay estimation in CMOS gates, power dissipation of CMOS logic, interconnected delay and signal integrity, design margining, reliability, and effects of scaling. Chapter 5 (Circuit Simulation, pp. 237-317) focuses on circuit simulation with SPICE as an efficient approach to obtain more accurate performance predictions as well as to verify the correctness of circuits and logic.

Chapter 6 (Combinational Circuit Design, pp. 319-382) deals with design of combinational circuits. The main topics discussed here relate to circuit families, and silicon-on-insulator circuit design.

Chapter 7 (Sequential Circuit Design, pp. 383-478) describes principles of operation of sequential circuit. Qualified analyses related to sequencing of static circuits, design of latches and flip-flops, static and dynamic sequencing, synchronizers, and wave pipelining are given.

Chapter 8 (Design Methodology and Tools, pp. 479-566) represents current CMOS design methods. Useful details concerning design flows and economics, data sheets and documentation, how to close the gap between ASIC and custom, CMOS physical design style, and interchange formats are given.

Chapter 9 (Testing and Verification, pp. 567-636) describes the important issues in CMOS chip testing and points to some methods for incorporating test considerations into chips from the start of the design.

Chapter 10 (Datapath Subsystems, pp. 637-712) addresses design options for common datapath operators including adders, one/zero detectors, comparators, counters, Boolean logic units, error-correcting code blocks, shifters, and multipliers.

Chapter 11 (Array Subsystems, pp. 713-760) describes memory subsystems including SRAMs, DRAMs, serial access memories, CAMs, ROMs, and PLAs.

Chapter 12 (Special-purpose Subsystems, pp. 761-847) addresses special-purpose subsystems that a digital designer may encounter. It concentrates on packaging, power distribution, I/O subsystems, clock generation and distribution, and mixed-signal blocks such as CMOS op- amps, A/D and D/A converters and radio-frequency circuits.

Tutorials in Verilog and VHDL are given in Appendix A and B, respectively.

Very useful book

CMOS VLSI Design: A Circuits and Systems Perspective is focused on very rapidly developing field such as designing of CMOS integrated circuits. It points to advances in technology and circuit design practices, and significantly improves understanding the concepts of CMOS VLSI ICs design.

The book is very well written, its organization is excellent, and the depth of each chapter covered is adequate. Each chapter of the book is organized in a scholarly way containing an introduction, analysis of the main theme, pitfalls and fallacies, summary, and set of unsolved problems.

The book is written for use as textbook for either upper class undergraduate or first-year graduate students in electrical engineering, and as a reference book for engineers and researchers active in the area of CMOS VLSI design. Anyone seriously interested in integrated circuits design will benefit from reading this book.

All in all, I highly recommend this book.