Design

Methodologies
 Introduction

The dramatic increase of contemporary

integrated circuits poses an enormous
design challenges.

Depending up on the applications and

day by day needs, the number of logic
transistors per chip are growing and
leading to the IC complexity.
• The above graph shows, how IC
complexity is growing faster than
productivity of a design engineer,
creating the design gap.

• Out of all the approaches the

preferred is to mapping a function
onto the silicon depends largely
upon the function itself.
• Example
Consider a simple digital processor
which composes a number of building
blocks that occur in one form or another
in almost every digital processor.

Composition of generic digital processor

are shown below . The arrows
represents the possible interconnections.
 MEMORY
INPUT/OUTPUT

CONTROL

DATAPATH
 Custom to semicustom .

Designing of microelectronics depends

on a number of factors such as

• Power consumption.
• Cost.
• Production volume.
The cost of a semiconductor device is a
sum of two components :

• The nonrecurring expense (NRE), which

is incurred only for a design and
includes the cost of designing the part.

• The production cost per part, which is a

function of the process complexity,
design area, and process yield.
 Digital Circuit Implementation Approaches

Custom Semicustom

Cell based Array based

Standard cells
Macro cells Pre-diffuse Pre-wired
Compiled cells
 Custom and Semicustom Circuit
Design
Custom design can be justified
economically under the following
conditions:

• The custom block can be reused many times.

• The cost can be amortized over a large volume.

Exp: Microprocessors and semiconductor memories
With continuous progress in the design-
automation arena, the share of custom design
reduces from year to year.

Library cell design is the only area where

custom design still thrives today.

virtually all portions are designed

automatically using semi custom design
approaches.
Cell-based Design methodology

Since the custom design approach proves

to be prohibitively expensive, a wide
variety of design approaches have been
introduced over the years to shorten and
automate the design process.

The idea behind cell-based is to reduce the

implementation effort by reusing a limited
library of cells.
 Standard cell

• The standard cell approach standardizes the

design entry level at the logic gate. A library
containing a wide range of fan-in and fan-out
counts is provided.

• In standard cell, cells are placed in a row which

are separated by routing channels.

• All the cells are of same height and the widths

of the cells can vary to accommodate for the
variation in complexity between the cells.
A substantial fraction of area is devoted
for signal routing.

With feedthrough cells we can minimize

the length of the wire used to connect
between cells.

The only exceptions are when extreme

high performance or low energy is
needed.
Thank you

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