Center for Silicone System Implementation Overview

Phenomenal progress in semiconductor technologies has been facilitated by the advancement of design automation tools and capabilities. But as system sizes head toward trillions of transistors, and physical effects force us to examine the finer details of design and manufacturing, advances in electronic design automation (EDA) alone cannot maintain this rate of integrated circuit (IC) design progress. Now when implementing electronic systems in silicon, we must consider new forms of design regularity and structure concurrently with advancements in design automation.

Research Objectives

The research projects within CSSI span seven focus areas:

• Digital: The complexity associated with new fabrication technologies requires new approaches for digital design implementation. Projects focus on creating methods and tools for the design, verification and manufacture of future-generation digital systems.

• Circuits: In current technologies, many non-idealities could be ignored due to their insignificant impact on circuit behavior. However, in future-generation technologies, the effects of non-idealities will be prominent and they will be dealt with through new modeling and analysis, or altogether bypassed through the development of new approaches to circuit implementation.

• Analog: The push for System-on-Chip (SoC) means that analog circuits must be implemented side-by-side with digital circuits using a common fabrication technology. New techniques are required for the design, analysis and implementation of analog and RF circuits that operate robustly in state-of-the-art technologies that are mainly tuned for digital circuits.

• Silicon Interface: To fabricate high-yielding, reliable ICs requires an understanding of the fabrication process and the relationship it has to design. Projects focus on understanding this relationship in future technologies.

• MEMS: MEMS is an all-encompassing acronym that refers to all the non-electrical devices that can be fabricated using semiconductor technologies. Projects focus on the methods and tools for MEMS design, verification and fabrication.

• Integrated Systems: The push for SoC means that design partitioning, optimization, tradeoff analysis, etc. involves digital, analog, MEMS and software components. Projects focus on the creation of models, methods and tools for performing SoC design involving at least two of these components.

• Computing Systems: Implementation of future-generation computing systems will be hampered by their enormous complexity. To overcome this challenge, new architecture approaches along with techniques that formally verify their correctness are needed. Projects focus on developing techniques for computer system implementation and verification approaches that scale.