This document provides an introduction to the VLSI Design course EEL3320. It discusses the evolution of integrated circuits from early computers to modern microprocessors containing billions of transistors. The course will cover CMOS device operation, circuit design, sequential elements, and design methodologies. Students will learn how to design and optimize digital circuits for cost, speed, power, and reliability. The document outlines the course content, textbooks, evaluation criteria, and instructor details.

1. VLSI Design
(Course Code: EEL3320)
Lectures 1-3:
Introduction : Evolution of Design
Course Instructor:
Shree Prakash Tiwari, Ph.D.
Email: sptiwari@iitj.ac.in
Webpage: http://home.iitj.ac.in/~sptiwari/
Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, Year 2023
1
Note: The information provided in the slides are taken mainly form two text books of VLSI
Design(Jan M. Rabaey, .. & Neil H. Weste, …), ITRS 2.0, and other resources from internet, for
teaching/academic use only

2. What is this course is about?
• Introduction to CMOS VLSI circuits
– CMOS devices and manufacturing technology
– CMOS inverters and gates
– Propagation delay, noise margins, and power dissipation
– Sequential circuits. Arithmetic, interconnect, and
memories
– Design methodologies
• What will you learn?
– Understanding, designing, and optimizing digital circuits
with respect to different quality metrics: cost, speed,
power dissipation, and reliability

3. Books
Text Books:
1. Jan M. Rabaey, Anantha Chandrakasan, and Borivoje Nikolic´,
Digital integrated circuits , A design perspective, 2nd Edition,
PHI Learning (2011)
2. Neil H.E. Weste, David Money Harris, CMOS VLSI Design, 4th
Edition, Pearson (2009)
3

4. Evaluation (Tentative)
• Quizzes (4) 20 %
• Midterm Exam 15 %
• Final Written Exam 30 %
• Final Viva 10 %
• Term Paper 15%
• Course Project 10%
4

5. Brief History
The First Computer: Babbage Difference Engine (1832)
•Executed basic operations
(add, sub, mult, div) in arbitrary
sequences
•Operated in two-cycle
sequence, “Store”, and “Mill”
(execute)
•Included features like
pipelining to make it faster.
•Complexity: 25,000 parts.

6. The Electrical Solution
•More cost effective
•Early systems used relays to make simple logic devices
•Still used today in some train safety systems
•The Vacuum Tube
•Originally used for analog processing
•Later, complete digital computers realized
High Point of Tubes: The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And
Computer)
•18,000 vacuum tubes
•80 ft long, 8.5 ft high, several feet wide

7. ENIAC - The first electronic computer (1946)

8. Dawn of the Transistor Age
1951: Shockley develops junction
transistor which can be
manufactured in quantity.
1947: Bardeen and Brattain
create point-contact transistor
w/two PN junctions. Gain = 18

9. Evolution of IC
9
Bardeen, Brattain, and
Shockley (Seated) @ Bell
Laboratories, 1948. The Nobel
prize was given in 1956.
First Point contact
Transistor (1947, Bell
Labs) with Germanium
semiconductor, and
two gold contacts
separated by 50
micron.
First IC, Developed
independently by
J. Kilby (Texas Instruments) and
R. Noyce, J. Hoerni (Fairchild
Semiconductor), 1958.
Co-recipient of
Nobel prize
in physics in 2000

10. 1959: Planar Technology
• Developed at Fairchild
Semiconductor
• Planar Technology (Jean
Hoerni): base region is diffused
into collector (substrate) and
emitter region into the base
• Integrated Wiring (Robert
Noyce): By covering the planar
transistor with an oxide, a layer
of aluminum can be used on top
to wire the device(s)
10

11. 1961: First Commercial Planar IC
• Based on the planar process by
Hoerni and Noyce, Fairchild
developed family of logic chips
called resistors-transistor
logic(RTL)
• Example shown is flip flop with
4 bipolar transistors and five
resistors
11

12. Practice Makes Perfect
1961: TI and Fairchild introduced first
logic IC
(cost ~ $50 in quantity!). This is a dual
flip-flop with 4 transistors.
1963: Densities and yields improve.
This circuit has four flip-flops.

13. 13
The First Integrated Circuits
Bipolar logic
1960’s
ECL 3-input Gate
Motorola 1966
Digital Integrated Circuits, 2nd Ed., Rabaey.

14. Practice Makes Perfect
1967: Fairchild markets the first semi-
custom chip. Transistors (organized in
columns) can be easily rewired to
create different circuits. Circuit has
~150 logic gates.
1968: Noyce and Moore leave Fairchild to form Intel.
By 1971 Intel had 500 employees;
By 2004, 80,000 employees in 55 countries and
$34.2B in sales.

15. The Big Bang
1970: Intel starts
selling a 1k bit RAM,
the 1103.
1971: Ted Hoff at Intel designed the
first microprocessor. The 4004 had 4-
bit busses and a clock rate of 108 KHz.
It had 2300 transistors and was built in
a 10 um process.

16. Exponential Growth
1972: 8080 introduced.
Had 3,500 transistors supporting a
byte-wide data path.
1974: Introduction of the 8088.
Had 6,000 transistors in a 6 um
process. The clock rate was 2 MHz.

17. From 4 Transistors to 300-mm Wafers
Batch Fabrication
17

18. What is a VLSI IC?
VERY LARGE SCALE Integration
A circuit that has 10k ~ 1Bln
transistors on a single chip
•Still growing as number of
transistors on chip
quadruple every 24 months
(Moore’s law!)
Technique where many
circuit components and the
wiring that connects them
are manufactured
simultaneously on a
compact chip (die)
INTEGRATED CIRCUIT

19. Today
Many disciplines have contributed to the current state of the art in
VLSI Design:
•Solid State Physics
•Materials Science
•Lithography and fab
•Device modeling
•Circuit design and
layout
•Architecture design
•Algorithms
•CAD tools
To come up with chips like:

20. Pentium 4
– Introduction date: November
20, 2000
• 1.4 GHz clock
• fabricated in 180 nm process,
• 42 mln transistors)
– In 2002 (2 GHz in 130 nm, 55
mln transistors)
– In 2005 (3.8 GHz in 90 nm, 125
mln transistors)
– Typical Use: Desktops and
entry-level workstations

21. •In 2006
•143 mm2
•3 GHZ operation
•65 nm CMOS
technology
•291 mln transistors
Intel Core 2 Microprocessor

22. Other chips
from http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/chipshots/index.html
cyrix_math_coprocessor_83S87 Fairchild Clipper C100

23. Other chips
from http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/chipshots/index.html
Motorola MC68020
IBM/Motorola Power PC620

24. International Technology Roadmap for
Semiconductors(ITRS)
• ITRS is a set of reports and documents produced by a group
of semiconductor industry experts.
• These experts are representative of the sponsoring
organisations which include the Semiconductor Industry
Associations of the United States, Europe, Japan, South
Korea and Taiwan.
24
Ref. ITRS 2.0, 2015

25. Summary: ITRS 2.0
• For past 50 years, industry is following
Moore’s law.
• Each new technology node produces faster
transistors
• Initially, nobody worried about power, and the
motto was “performance at any cost”
• Later in the last decade, keeping increase in
number of transistors and operating
frequency became difficult due to power
issues
25

26. Introduction
• Semiconductor Industry was born in 1970s
with three business drivers
– Cost effective memory devices to computer
industry
– Production of Application Specific Integrated
Circuits (ASICs)
– Cost effective integration of simple building blocks
to make electronic systems
26

27. Moore’s Law
• In 1965, Gordon Moore noted that the
number of transistors on a chip doubled every
18 to 24 months.
• He made a prediction that semiconductor
technology will double its effectiveness every
18 months
27

28. The Ever Shrinking Transistor
28
Using 45 nm technology, ≈ 400 transistors fit on a red blood cell!

29. Moore’s law in Microprocessors
4004
8008
8080
8085 8086
286
386
486
Pentium® proc
P6
0.001
0.01
0.1
1
10
100
1000
1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Year
Transistors
(MT)
2X growth in 1.96 years!
Transistors on Lead Microprocessors double every 2 years
Courtesy, Intel

30. Die Size Growth
4004
8008
8080
8085
8086
286
386
486 Pentium ® proc
P6
1
10
100
1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Year
Die
size
(mm)
~7% growth per year
~2X growth in 10 years
Die size grows by 14% to satisfy Moore’s Law
Courtesy, Intel

31. Power dissipation warning in 2000
5KW
18KW
1.5KW
500W
4004
8008
8080
8085
8086
286
386
486
Pentium® proc
0.1
1
10
100
1000
10000
100000
1971 1974 1978 1985 1992 2000 2004 2008
Year
Power
(Watts)
Did this really happen?
Courtesy, Intel

32. Power density
4004
8008
8080
8085
8086
286
386
486
Pentium® proc
P6
1
10
100
1000
10000
1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Year
Power
Density
(W/cm2)
Hot Plate
Nuclear
Reactor
Rocket
Nozzle
Power density too high to keep junctions at low temp
Courtesy, Intel
New devices
such as Tunnel
FETs !!!

33. No Moore’s Law in future!!
33

34. Digital Cellular Market
(Phones Shipped)
1996 1997 1998 1999 2000
Units 48M 86M 162M 260M 435M
Cell
Phones
Not Only Microprocessors
iPod
Video games
Analog
Baseband
Digital Baseband
(DSP + MCU)
Power
Management
Small
Signal RF
Power
RF
iTablet

35. Today’s Electronic Products:
Result of Heterogeneous Integration
35

36. Example: IoT Driver
36

37. Challenges in Digital Design
“Microscopic Problems”
• Ultra-high speed design
• Interconnect
• Noise, Crosstalk
• Reliability, Manufacturability
• Power Dissipation
• Clock distribution.
Everything Looks a Little Different
“Macroscopic Issues”
• Time-to-Market
• Millions of Gates
• High-Level Abstractions
• Reuse & IP: Portability
• Predictability
• etc.
…and There’s a Lot of Them!

38. Design Abstraction Levels
n+
n+
S
G
D
+
DEVICE
CIRCUIT
GATE
MODULE
SYSTEM

39. What next

40. Summary
• VLSI Design will be continuing for next many
years
• Proper understanding and Training for CMOS
and VLSI is required
• Research for new device designs and materials
is necessary
• Exploratory work should also be encouraged
for new technologies
40