This is the official web page of the Spring 2023 CSE 122/222A courses.
This course covers VLSI fabrication, circuits and design methodologies for Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). It familiarizes students with real-world tools during the design of a small system-on-a-chip project. Students are encouraged to fabricate and test their chips in an independent study.
The course schedule is available here.
The class materials will all be available on the GitHub class site.
This course does not cover all of the material in the book, but presents selected topics from:
Digital Integrated Circuits (2nd Edition) - A Design Perspective by Rabaey, Chandrakasan, & Nikolic (ISBN-10: 0130909963) You will likely find it cheap used or excerpts online.
Electronic Design Automation for IC Implementation, Circuit Design, and Process Technology Edited by Luciano Lavagno, Igor L. Markov, Grant Martin, and Louis K. Scheffer, CRC Press 2016. (ISBN-10: 0849379245) It is available through the campus library electronically.
We have a class Slack workspace where you can ask questions. If you are not invited, please contact the TA for an invitation to the workspace.
This course does not have a final examination but has two quizzes, two homeworks, and a project. You should expect to start early as this is not a trivial amount of work. The homework and project exposes you to an industrial, open-source tool flow.
The project is an individual or pair project related to SOC design. This may be a design project, a CAD tool project, or something else interesting that is approved by the professor. Each project will create a small video presentation to summarize their project for the rest of the class.
There is also a significant portion of the grade that is attendance/partitipation. You should come to class and participate to receive full points for this. This may include attendance or pop quizzes.
The class grade is determined by the following criteria:
The quizzes will be given in class or online. They are based on the homework and lecture material.
You must have access to a laptop with either Linux, Windows, or MacOSX that supports Docker.
There is no official lab section for this course, but the homework and project requires you to use CAD tools to complete them. Tutorials are provided for these tools and it is your responsibility to start early and become familiar with the tools. The tools are all open source. You can get help on these tools from the instructor as needed, but you must get help early.
We will have a project video showing during the assigned exam time. Please plan to attend to answer any questions about your video.
Every student will receive 3 late days that can be used on either homework assignments or the final project implementation. The final video cannot be late. The quizzes cannot be taken late.
Incompletes will be given only for medical and family emergencies. In this event, you must be in good standing (i.e. have a passing grade so far) and request an incomplete from the instructor before the end of the quarter.
All course work should be your own work unless it is specified as a group project. You may consult with me, the TA and other students, verbally and possibly with the use of a board. However, you must be able to produce the solution to the problem without any notes from this consultation. It will be necessary to spend some time thinking about a problem before consulting anyone. You must cite any materials (besides the text and course handouts) that you use to solve the problems. Plagiarism is using any text without proper citation. Any academic dishonesty incidents will be reported while giving a 0 grade for that assignment/exam/lab.
Please note that students may be disciplined for selling, preparing, or distributing course lecture notes, including notes created independently by students. The unauthorized sale of lecture notes, handouts, readers or other course materials is a violation of campus policies as well as state law. Violation by distribution to the public may also constitute copyright infringement subject to legal action.
If you would like to request academic accommodations due to a disability, please contact the Disabled Resource Center, 146 Hahn Student Services, (831)459-2089(voice) (831)459-4806(TDD/TTY). They can authorize specific accommodations for you on an Accommodation Request Form. Please present this form to the instructor in the first 2 weeks of the quarter so that we can discuss the accommodations you need for class. You will need to confirm with me again at least two weeks before each exam about your testing accommodations.