Page 265 - A Practical Guide from Design Planning to Manufacturing

Circuit Design 237

5. What is the difference between a speedpath and a race?
6. What is the difference between clock skew and clock jitter?
7. What is the difference between a valid window and a required window?
8. What are four sources of circuit noise?
9. What is the difference between active power and leakage power?
10. What is the difference between subthreshold leakage and gate leakage?
11. [Lab] Measure the current versus voltage of a MOSFET. What is the
threshold voltage of the MOSFET?
12. [Bonus] Calculate the optimum fanout for a gate with T fan = 1 and
T base = 1. What is the optimum if T base = 2?

Bibliography
Bakoglu, H. Circuits, Interconnections, and Packaging for VLSI. Reading MA: Addison-
Wesley, 1990.
Bernstein, Kerry et al. High Speed CMOS Design Styles. Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1998.
Glasser, Lance and Daniel Dobberpuhl. The Design and Analysis of VLSI Circuits. Reading
MA: Addison-Wesley, 1985.
Harris, David. Skew-Tolerant Circuit Design. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann
Publishers, 2001. [A great book describing how clock skew affects different types of
circuits and how its impact can be minimized.]
Mano, Morris. Computer Engineering: Hardware Design. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-
Hall, 1988.
Roy, Kaushik and Sharat Prasad. Low Power CMOS VLSI: Circuit Design. New York:
Wiley-Interscience, 2000.
Sedra, Adel and Kenneth Smith. Microelectronic Circuits. 4th ed., New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997.
Sutherland, Ivan, Robert Sproull, and David Harris. Logical Effort: Designing Fast CMOS
Circuits. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1999. [The best book I’ve seen on
fanout and sizing CMOS gates.]
Uyemura, John. Introduction to VLSI Circuits and Systems. New York: Wiley, 2001.
Weste, Neil and Kamran Eshraghian. Principles of CMOS VLSI Design: A Systems
Perspective. Reading MA: Addison-Wesley, 1988. [One of the most commonly used
circuit design textbooks, this book is an excellent introduction and includes information
on layout missing from most circuit design books.]
Ziegler, James et al. “IBM Experiments in Soft Fails in Computer Electronics (1978–1994).”
IBM Journal of Research and Development, vol. 40, no. 1, 1998, pp. 3–18. [IBM has
probably done more study of soft errors than any other company, and this article is a
detailed review of their findings.]