VLSI Design

and
Testing(BEC602
)

Dr. POORNIMA G R
Professor
 Overview of VLSI
Section 1 Design
Key Components of VLSI Design
 Testing in VLSI
Section 2 Design
Section Challenges and Future
3 Trends in VLSI
 • In 1958, Jack Kilby built the first integrated circuit flip-flop
with two transistors at Texas Instruments.
• In 2008, Intel’s Itanium microprocessor contained more
than 2 billion transistors, and a 16 Gb Flash memory
contained more than 4 billion transistors.
• This corresponds to a compound annual growth rate of
53% over 50 years.
Introducti • This incredible growth has come from steady
miniaturization of transistors and improvements in
on manufacturing processes.
• However, as transistors become smaller, they also
become faster, dissipate less power, and are cheaper to
manufacture.
• The processing performance once dedicated to secret
government supercomputers is now available in
disposable cellular telephones.
 • Figure 1.1 shows annual sales in the worldwide semiconductor
market.
• Integrated circuits became a $100 billion/year business in 1994.
• In 2007, the industry manufactured approximately 6 quintillion (6 ×
1018) transistors, or nearly a billion for every human being on the
planet.

Introducti • During the first half of the twentieth century, electronic circuits
used large, expensive, power-hungry, and unreliable vacuum
tubes. In 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain built the first
on Contd.. functioning point contact transistor at Bell Laboratories, shown in
Figure 1.2(a) [Riordan97].
• It was nearly classified as a military secret, but Bell Labs publicly
introduced the device the following year.
• We have called it the Transistor, T-R-A-N-S-I-S-T-O-R, because it
is a resistor or semiconductor device which can amplify electrical
signals as they are transferred through it from input to output
terminals.
Introduction Contd..
• Ten years later, Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments realized the potential for miniaturization if
multiple transistors could be built on one piece of silicon.
• Figure 1.2(b) shows his first prototype of an integrated circuit, constructed from a
germanium slice and gold wires.
• The invention of the transistor earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 for Bardeen,
Brattain, and their supervisor William Shockley. Kilby received the Nobel Prize in Physics
in 2000 for the invention of the integrated circuit.
• Transistors can be viewed as electrically controlled switches with a control terminal and
two other terminals that are connected or disconnected depending on the voltage or
current applied to the control.
• Soon after inventing the point contact transistor, Bell Labs developed the bipolar junction
transistor. Bipolar transistors were more reliable, less noisy, and more power-efficient.
• Early integrated circuits primarily used bipolar transistors.
• Bipolar transistors require a small current into the control (base) terminal to switch much
larger currents between the other two (emitter and collector) terminals.
• The quiescent power dissipated by these base currents, drawn even when the circuit is
not switching, limits the maximum number of transistors that can be integrated onto a
single die.
 Introduction Contd..
• By the 1960s, Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors (MOSFETs) began to enter production.
MOSFETs offer the compelling advantage that they draw almost zero control current while idle.
• They come in two flavors: nMOS and pMOS, using n-type and p-type silicon, respectively.
• The original idea of field effect transistors dated back to the German scientist Julius Lilienfield in 1925 [US
patent 1,745,175] and a structure closely resembling the MOSFET was proposed in 1935 by Oskar Heil
[British patent 439,457], but materials problems foiled early attempts to make functioning devices.
• In 1963, Frank Wanlass at Fairchild described the first logic gates using MOSFETs [Wanlass63].
Fairchild’s gates used both nMOS and pMOS transistors, earning the name Complementary Metal Oxide
Semiconductor, or CMOS.
• The circuits used discrete transistors but consumed only nanowatts of power, six orders of magnitude
less than their bipolar counterparts.
• With the development of the silicon planar process, MOS integrated circuits became attractive for their
low cost because each transistor occupied less area and the fabrication process was simpler [Vadasz69].
• Early commercial processes used only pMOS transistors and suffered from poor performance, yield, and
reliability. Processes using nMOS transistors became common in the 1970s [Mead80].
• Intel pioneered nMOS technology with its 1101 256-bit static random access memory and 4004 4-bit
microprocessor, as shown in Figure 1.3.
Introduction Contd..
Introduction Contd..
• While the nMOS process was less expensive than CMOS,
nMOS logic gates still consumed power while idle.
• Power consumption became a major issue in the 1980s as
hundreds of thousands of transistors were integrated onto a
single die.
• CMOS processes were widely adopted and have essentially
replaced nMOS and bipolar processes for nearly all digital logic
applications.
• In 1965, Gordon Moore observed that plotting the number of
transistors that can be most economically manufactured on a
chip gives a straight line on a semilogarithmic scale [Moore65].
Introduction Contd..
• At the time, he found transistor count doubling every 18 months.
• This observation has been called Moore’s Law and has become
a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• Figure 1.4 shows that the number of transistors in Intel
microprocessors has doubled every 26 months since the
invention of the 4004.
• Moore’s Law is driven primarily by scaling down the size of
transistors and, to a minor extent, by building larger chips.
• The level of integration of chips has been classified as small-
scale, medium-scale, large-scale, and very largescale. Small-
scale integration (SSI) circuits, such as the 7404 inverter, have
fewer than 10 gates, with roughly half a dozen transistors per
gate.
Introduction Contd..
Introduction Contd..
• Medium-scale integration (MSI) circuits, such as the 74161 counter, have up to
1000 gates.
• Large-scale integration (LSI) circuits, such as simple 8-bit microprocessors, have
up to 10,000 gates.
• It soon became apparent that new names would have to be created every five
years if this naming trend continued and thus the term very large-scale
integration (VLSI) is used to describe most integrated circuits from the 1980s
onward.
• A corollary of Moore’s law is Dennard’s Scaling Law [Dennard74]: as transistors
shrink, they become faster, consume less power, and are cheaper to
manufacture.
Introduction Contd..
Introduction Contd..
• The feature size of a CMOS manufacturing process refers to the minimum dimension of a
transistor that can be reliably built.
• The 4004 had a feature size of 10 µm in 1971. The Core 2 Duo had a feature size of 45 nm
in 2008.
• Manufacturers introduce a new process generation (also called a technology node) every
2–3 years with a 30% smaller feature size to pack twice as many transistors in the same
area.
• Figure 1.6 shows the progression of process generations. Feature sizes down to 0.25 µm
are generally specified in microns (10–6 m), while smaller feature sizes are expressed in
nanometers (10–9 m).
• Effects that were relatively minor in micron processes, such as transistor leakage,
variations in characteristics of adjacent transistors, and wire resistance, are of great
significance in nanometer processes.
Introduction Contd..
Introduction Contd..
• Figure 1.5 shows that Intel microprocessor clock frequencies have doubled
roughly every 34 months.
• This frequency scaling hit the power wall around 2004, and clock
frequencies have leveled off around 3 GHz.
• Computer performance, measured in time to run an application, has
advanced even more than raw clock speed.
• Presently, the performance is driven by the number of cores on a chip
rather than by the clock.
• Even though an individual CMOS transistor uses very little energy each
time it switches, the enormous number of transistors switching at very high
rates of speed have made power consumption a major design
consideration again.
• Moreover, as transistors have become so small, they cease to turn
completely OFF. Small amounts of current leaking through each transistor
now lead to significant power consumption when multiplied by millions or
billions of transistors on a chip.
 MOS Transistor
• Complementary MOSFET (CMOS) technology is widely
used today to form circuits for various applications.
• Today’s computers, CPUs and cell phones make use of
CMOS, due to several key advantages.
• CMOS offers low power dissipation, relatively high speed,
high noise margins in both states, and will operate over a
wide range of sources and input voltages (provided the
source voltage is fixed)
• The type of transistor available is the Metal-Oxide-
Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor (MOSFET).
• These transistors are formed as a ‘sandwich’ consisting
of a semiconductor layer, usually a slice, or wafer, from a
single crystal of silicon of 1.5 cm in diameter
• A layer of silicon dioxide (the oxide) and a layer of metal.
Basic Silicon Doping
MOS Transistor
• As shown in the figure, MOS structure contains three layers −
• The Metal Gate Electrode(Polysilicon or Aluminum)
• The Insulating Oxide Layer (SiO2)
• p/n – type Semiconductor (Substrate) with diffused p type or n type
impurities to form Source and Drain terminals
• MOS structure forms a capacitor, with gate and substrate are as two plates
and oxide layer as the dielectric material.
• The thickness of dielectric material (SiO2) is usually between 10 nm and 50
nm.
• Carrier concentration and distribution within the substrate can be
manipulated by external voltage applied to gate and substrate terminal.
• Voltage controlled Device
Types of MOS
Transistors
• n- channel MOSFET
• p-channel MOSFET
MOS transistor Symbols
nMOS and pMOS switch symbols and characteristics
MOS TRANSISTORS

37
 • In both NMOS and PMOS transistor, the voltage applied
MOS transistor between the gate and source acts as a control voltage.
• By controlling the gate to source voltage, PMOS and NMOS
Switch Function transistor can be used as a switch. And they can be used to
design a logic gate.
MOS
Transistor
switches

40
A
Complement
ary Switch

42
CMOS
Logic

43
44
The NAND Gate

45
The NOR Gate

46
Compound Gates

47
48
Construction of function

49
Multiplexers

50
Memory

51
Positive
Edge
triggered
D Flip-
Flop
 Circuit
and
System
Represent
ation
 Alternate Circuit representations
• Behavioural representation-Hard ware Description Language(Ex:
Verilog,VHDL,ELLA)
• Structural representation-Transistors are connected in Circuit Design
• Physical representation

Behavioural representation:
• Behavior of a gate can be defined in terms of Boolean function.

• Add operation summarized as HDL.

• Behavior of a Flip flop can be given as below

54
 Structural representation:
components connection to perform a certain function

Inverter:

Syntax:

2-input Nand Gate:

Behavioral description:
55
56
• Transmission gate in MODEL

• Flipflop(D latch)

57
Physical Representation

58
Layout of an Inverter

59
Layout of 2 –input Transmission
Gate

60
Physical Layer Interconnections

61
Physical Construction of CMOS Flipflop

62
63