Let's Program the Transistors
A test chip is a small-scale integrated circuit that is specifically designed for testing purposes, feasibility checks and performance analysis. It serves as a platform for evaluating the functionality of individual circuit blocks, testing the reliability of manufacturing processes, and verifying the performance of the design before it is implemented in a larger chip. Test…
Electronic circuits can broadly be divided into two broad categories: Some advantages of digital over analog are as below: Today, digital technology is applied in a wide range of applications. The most common digital end products are computers, television, communication systems, consumer electronics, etc. Sampling and Quantization are the techniques that are used to convert…
MPW stands for Multi-Project Wafer, which is a cost-effective way to prototype integrated circuits. In an MPW, multiple projects share a single wafer during the fabrication process, which enables lower costs by spreading the cost of the wafer among multiple projects. Typically, several customers with small designs collaborate to share the costs of the wafer…
ASCII codes are alphanumeric codes that represent numbers, alphabets, symbols and special characters in computers. ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Whenever we press a key from the keyboard, the corresponding ASCII code goes into the computer. ASCII has 128 characters that can be represented using 7 bits (00 to 7F in…
A wafer is a thin slice of semiconductor material, typically made of silicon, that serves as the substrate for the fabrication of integrated circuits in the field of VLSI. During the fabrication process, the wafer undergoes a series of processes such as doping, lithography, etching, and deposition to create the desired patterns and structures for…
Modern day Syetem-on-Chips are so complex that pre-silicon verification is no more the sufficient step to capture all the design bugs. Even with sophisticated verification process, achieving 100% coverage is difficult. Due to this, few bugs escape from the pre-silicon verification till the actual product on silicon. So, now-a-days industries perform post-silicon validation (commonly known…
Both Verification and Validation checks for the correctness of the design. These design steps try to detect and localize functional bugs in the system. While pre-silicon verification runs the test cases on the software prototypes of the design on the simulator, post-silicon validation is executed on a few initial hardware prototypes of the design on…
Read More “Pre-Silicon Verification vs. Post-Silicon Validation” »
Resistive divider circuit can alternatively be called as voltage divider circuit. Such a circuit is shown in the following figure: This circuit divides the input voltage Vin depending on the resistance values according to the following formula: Vout = Vin x (R2/(R1 + R2)) Vout is the output voltage, which is nothing but the voltage…
Now we are ready to simulate the layout view off this cell. Let’s open up the schematic view of the cell and copy the SPICE code. Go back to the layout view and paste the SPICE code. Increase the text size of the spice code to 10 by going to its object property (Ctrl+I). The…
Open the layout view of the Resistive_divider cell and then copy/paste (Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V) an additional resistor. Running a DRC (pressing F5) on the above layout results in the following error. By pressing > we see that there is too little space between the N-wells. Move the Nodes apart until the layout passes the DRCs. Of-course the…