The word of Chip designing means building an integrated Chip, by integrating billions of transistors to achieve an application. An Application could be suiting a particular requirement like Microprocessor, Router, cell phone, etc. An Integrated circuit designed for a specific application is called as ASIC(Application Specific Integrated Circuits).

Todays ASIC Chips is prettly complex packed with larger chunk of transistors targetted to a specific manufacturing process for fabricating the integrated circuits, in a sub nanometer regime, involving lots and lots of challenges, like knowledge of various protocols, architectures, models, formats, standards, knowledge about CMOS logic, Digital Design concepts, taming the EDA tool for the various design requirement's like area, timing, power, thermal, noise, routability, lithography aware, knowledge about Various variabilities like channel length, Vt, line width variations, lens abrreations, IR drop effects,inter-die, intra die-variations, effects, and various noise-effects like Package noise,EMI noise,power grid noise,cross-talk noise and ability to test and validate and know to model and characterize all these effects upfront in the design-phase,steps to increase yield to increase profitability curve, with short span of time-to market to minimize the risk and maximize the predictability and an modular approach to Success. Now let's dwelve in to the "Art of Chip Designing"

Used lot of Technical Jargons, nothing to worry about we will get in there soon...Be with me promise you to understand the Concepts behind Chip Desiging.

Before Designing a Chip? Need to Brain Storm

1. What market the Chip is targetted for?
2. What are the Protocols involved in the Chip?
3. What is going to be our Processor/Bus Architecutes?
4. what is the power/IR-drop/timing/Area/Yield/ targets and how to budget it in the Chip?
5. What is the process in which the Chip going to be manufactured?
7. what are the various third party IP's/Memory requirements?
8. what is our Design flow and EDA tools and methodology involved?
9. What is the estimated Chip Cost?
10. Above all the bottom line of any business model is money, What will be our Profit model ,estimation of our ROI(Return of investment).

Analogy of Chip Design Architecture Vs Building Architecture.

Why an Analogy with Building Architecture,It is just to understand the concepts of Chip desiging in a better way, as we are very familiar with Building Architecture, then it will be easy for us to map Chip Design architecture.

VLSI(Very large scale Integration) flow was evolved similar to the flow involved in Building Construction.Now let us dwelve in to the constuction flow to better understand the VLSI Chip design flow development.

When ever we start to construct a building, we will have an architecture, how the building should look like , the exterior looks and all, similar to that we will be designing an architecture in the chip-design, based on the requirement of the product, what the product is addressed for and whom to serve what needs, the so called specification, will having the modules.

Now lets go in to the implementation part of both the Building & Chip.

We at first come with the floorplan of the building, similarly we come with the floorplan of the Chip, Based on the connectivity/accessibility/vaasthu we place our rooms, similarly we have the constraints to place the blocks. Like we build the building with bricks, for Chip Design we have libraries, which are like pre-designed bricks, for a specific functionality.

Now let us try to understand the power-structure or electrical connectivity in our Building. Initially we have an Electrical plan for our building, where we have a requirement that all our electrical gadgets needs to get power. Similar to that we have a Chip power requirement, The required power is supplied through the power-pads, over a ring like topology to have a uniform distribution across all corners of the chip, and the supply has to reach all the standard-cells(bricks for Chip-Designing).,this is called as power-grid topology in the Chip-Design, now the requirement is how well we design our Power-grid, to reduce the IR-drop so that our standard-cells get proper power requirement.

I would not make justice, if I don't discuss about clock and clock-tree in the Chip-Design flow. We have synchronous way of designing and asynchronous way of designing(difficult to verify). Majority of chips follow Synchronous way of coding, for which Static Timing Analysis is possible. For the relevancy of the flops the clock to those flops should reach at the same time from the crystal, with in some skew targets with in the chip.In order to make this happen, a step called as clock-tree is performed after power-grid is created.

Let us try to visualize the concept behind Place & Route in Chip Design. We need to undergo lot of modeling concepts, to understand the process of Chip-Designing. To have a better understanding of this concept of place and route, let us assume a society where people who are speaking different languages are living , and let us visualize that people talking of the same languages are living in a community, then the communication is much easier , similar way in the chip-designing, the standard-cells who are having design relation-ships, are placed closer in the Placement flow this concept is called as regioning. Now with in the regioning, of the groups of the standard-cells, the cells which are really sharing data, has to placed close-by so that there timing is achieved and well optimized.This step is called placement, Connectivity across the standard-cells is called as routing, the challenge is having optimized or reduced wire-lengths.

Now let us try to try to understand the concept behind signal integrity in the Chip-Design , often called us SI Effect. As our process is shrinking day by day, and our silicon-realestate is costly, we try to accommodate more and more standard-cells in the limited area, so the cells are placed in very close proximity, so the switching of one can have an impact over the others behaviour, which can make the path to be faster or slower, this issue is called as signal-integrity. So similar way in our construction in order to maintain the integrity with in the house(neighbour free-zone), within the limited zone of modurality, we try to create fences, across buildings, similarly we can think of a concept called as Shielding, the high frequency signal net with the power-nets running across. We perform spacing across the buildings, similar way we can perform spacing across the nets, which are in close proximities.

In order to validate the silicon from the manufacturability issues, the concept in the Chip Desigining is Design for Test(DFT). One of the DFT techniques is scan-chain. To understand the concept of the scan-chain, we can visualize that we have a front-door entry and a back-door exit, and a person passes from the front-door and exits from the back-door exit of the building, that we are sure that there is no blocking within the rooms in the building, to make that person stuck , similar to this analogy the flip-flops are connected to-gether creating a scan-chain and test-input values are passed from the scan-chain input of the chip and expected data is visualized in the scan-chain output of the chip, then the assumption is the chip is free from manufacturability issues like stuck-at faults(stuck-at one or stuck at zeros).

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