lectures/l1_course_info

TFE4152 - Lecture 1

Design of Integrated Circuits

Source

Goal for today

• Who
• Course
• Exercises
• Project
• Software
• Why
• Skills
• How

Who

Carsten Wulff carstenw@ntnu.no

Teaching assistants

• Ehsan Lari
• Erlend Kristiansen Berg
• Jonas Gjendem Røysland

Course

Description

Time schedule

Curriculum

Tentative lecture plan

Exam

• December 2021?
• 4 hours
• D aids code - No handwritten or printed aids allowed. Preapproved calculator, in accordance to the exam regulations, allowed
• 70% of the final grade
• A - F grade (F = Fail)

Exercise

Facts

• 4 exercises on blackboard (somewhat modified from last year), 1 more to come, exercise 6 is special
• last years exercise and solutions on blackboard
• must have 4 of 6 exercises approved
• strict deadline (Friday XX 23:59)
• no second chances

Exercise 6: Maze in SystemVerilog

Exercise 6: Maze

1. Explain how the mazeEscaper.v works
2. Make a solution that is better
3. Upload PDF with explanation and verilog to Blackboard
4. Send mazeEscaper.v as attachment to carstenw@ntnu.no with subject TFE4152-Comp-Maze

Plan

Project

• 30 % of final grade
• Groups of 2 people. Find a partner soon. Sign up on blackboard.
• Deadline: 19’th November before 12:00 (24 hour format).
• Strict deadline, t > 12 : 00 ≡ fail. Both members in group must submit report.

A 10 000 Frames/s CMOS Digital Pixel Sensor

Goal

Be inspired by the paper, and design a similar system.

Design analog circuits in SPICE and digital circuits in SystemVerilog.

Minimum implementation

• 2 x 2 pixel array in SystemVerilog
• state machine to control reset, exposure, analog-to-digital conversion, and readout of the pixel array
• SPICE of pixel sensor (sensor, comparator, memory)
• Report documenting that the circuits (analog and digital) work as designed

Things it’s OK to ignore

• Transistor corners
• Gray counter (ask me why)
• Voltage variation
• Temperature variation
• “nice to have features”, like power optimalization, testability

What you get

github.com/wulffern/dicex

project/
├── spice/
│   ├── Makefile                # See https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Introduction.html
│   ├── pixelSensor.cir         # Empty circuit for pixelSensor
│   └── pixelSensor_tb.cir      # SPICE testbench for pixelSensor, emulates verilog
└── verilog/
    ├── Makefile                
    ├── pixelSensor.fl          # Verilog file list
    ├── pixelSensor_tb.gtkw     # Save file for GTKWave
    ├── pixelSensor_tb.v        # Verilog testbench for pixelSensor
    └── pixelSensor.v           # Verilog model of analog pixelSensor circuit

Report 1/2

• Introduction = Why?
• Theory = How?
  • As little information as possible. Give references to sources. Assume that the reader has read the paper.
• Implementation = What?
  • Describe what you designed
  • State diagrams, with explanation
  • Circuit diagrams, with explanation
  • One sub-chapter per block

Report 2/2

• Verification = Are you sure it works?
  • Describe your testbenches, and how you verified your design
  • Describe key results
• Discussion and conclusion = Why do you deserve a good grade?
• Appendix
  • SPICE netlist
  • SystemVerilog netlist
  • SystemVerilog testbench

You need to start now to be able to complete the project with a good grade

Proposed plan

Software

You may use what ever you want, but exercises and project have been developed using AIM-Spice, ngspice, iverilog, and GKTwave on Ubuntu linux 20.10

SPICE - AIM-Spice aimspice.com (Used for exercises) - NGSpice ngspice , version 34 (Recommended for project)

SystemVerilog - iverilog Icarus Verilog, version v11_0 - gtkwave GTKWave, version 3.3.104 - ( yosys Yosys, version 0.9 )

Option 1 : Install everything on your computer

The software can be installed on Windows, Mac, and Linux

Option 2 : Use login.stud.ntnu.no

Option 2: Quickstart for login.stud.ntnu.no

ssh to login.stud.ntnu.no, run

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wulffern/dicex/main/ubuntu_install.sh)"

Connect to login from a mac/linux so you get GUI also

ssh -c aes128-ctr -YC -o "ForwardX11Timeout 4W" <username>@login.stud.ntnu.no

Option 3: Ubuntu on docker image with VNC frontend

Run Ubuntu linux on your PC via docker and use a VNC client to connect

dicex and ciceda

Design of Integrated Circuits exercises (dicex) are the testbenches and model files you’ll need https://github.com/wulffern/dicex

Custom IC Creator Electronic Design Automation (ciceda) is a docker image of a ubuntu linux with the necessary tools installed https://github.com/wulffern/ciceda

dicex - Requirements

• Install Docker
• Install GIT
• Install TigerVNC (not needed on Mac)

dicex - Getting started

In a terminal or powershell

git clone https://github.com/wulffern/dicex
cd dicex
./ciceda_mac.sh

See demo video

Lower your expectations on EDA software

Expect that you will spend at least 2π times more time than planned (mostly due to software issues)

Questions?

Memo time

https://github.com/wulffern/dic2021/tree/main/2021-06-13_why_integrated_circuits

Purpose

_{1947: First transistor. Invented by Brattain, Bardeen and Shockley, Bell labs}

_{1961: First Monolithic Silicon IC Chip. Invented by Robert Noyce, Fairchild}

_{https://www.statista.com/statistics/802632/world-semiconductor-shipments/}

Virtex UltraScale+ VU19P (35 billion transistors)

Why would anyone buy a 1 M NOK FPGA?

_{https://cerebras.net/chip/}

nRF51, nRF52, nRF53 series devices from Nordic Semiconductor are all the same type of tool.

• Add connectivity (Bluetooth, Zigbee, custom radio protocol) to your product.
• Provide a microcontroller; CPU + peripherals like interfaces (SPI, UART, ADC, COMP, I2C) to process information, and interface with the world.

Skills

• Project flow support: Confluence, JIRA, risk management (DFMEA), failure analysis (8D)
• Language: English, Writing English (Latex, Word, Email)
• Psychology: Personalities, convincing people, presentations (Powerpoint, Deckset), stress management (what makes your brain turn off?)
• DevOps: Linux, bulid systems (CMake, make, ninja), continuous integration (bamboo, jenkins), version control (git), containers (docker), container orchestration (swarm, kubernetes)
• Programming: Python, Go, C, C++, Matlab _{Since 1999 I’ve programmed in Python, Go, Visual BASIC, PHP, Ruby, Perl, C#, SKILL, Ocean, Verilog-A, C++, BASH, AWK, VHDL, SPICE, MATLAB, ASP, Java, C, SystemC, Verilog, and probably a few I’ve forgotten.}
• Firmware: signal processing, algorithms
• Infrastructure: Power management, reset, bias, clocks
• Domains: CPUs, peripherals, memories, bus systems
• Sub-systems: Radio’s, analog-to-digital converters, comparators
• Blocks: Analog Radio, Digital radio baseband
• Modules: Transmitter, receiver, de-modulator, timing recovery, state machines
• Designs: Opamps, amplifiers, current-mirrors, adders, random access memory blocks, standard cells
• Tools: schematic, layout, parasitic extraction, synthesis, place-and-route, simulation, (System)Verilog, netlist
• Physics: transistor, pn junctions, quantum mechanics

Find a problem that you really want to solve, and learn a programming language to solve it. There is absolutely no point in saying “I want to learn programming”, then sitting down with a book to read about programming, and expect that you will learn programming that way. It will not happen. The only way to learn programming is to program, a lot. – Carsten Wulff

How

If you have questions on the course content (exercise, project, lectures)

Do

• google
• ask a someone in your class
• use the “øvingstime and labratorieøvelse” to talk to teaching assistants. Don’t ask about long future (future exercises).

If none of the above works, we’ll use first few minutes in each lectures for questions on the previous content (but not future content).

Don’t

• send email with questions on excercise, project, lectures etc. Long response time.
• use Teams. It interrupts the person your contacting.
• come to the office. I’m only at NTNU 20%.

There are approx 130 students. Email, teams, f2f does not scale.

Lecture 2: Manufacturing of integrated circuits

Homework => Sam Zeloof Home Chip Fab

Thanks!