Overview
The design of integrated circuits is nowadays unthinkable without the aid of design automation tools. EDA, Electronic Design Automation, is the rapidly growing, almost four billion dollar industry.
Everything made by the nearly $1 trillion electronics industry, from cellular phones, pacemakers, devices for automobiles and satellites, communication devices, computer chips, to the servers, routers and switches that run the Internet, results from designers using EDA tools and services. The gap between what current technology offers and how much of that can be used by designers is growing mostly due to tools not being able to deal with exponentially growing complexity of designs.
In the design cycle designers try to model the behavior of their designs and analyze the complex interactions of millions of constituent parts in their designs to ensure completeness, correctness, optimized performance, reduced power and manufacturability of the final product. Why? Because it is impossibly difficult, expensive and time consuming to "build it first and fix it later."
Design automation tools allow designers to achieve these goals.
Designers of full custom chips, ASICs and FPGAs or EDA tool developers are usually expected to have a graduate degree. A good understanding of manufacturing technologies, design processes and basic operations of DA tools is required from the designers so they can use efficiently tools from various EDA companies. Tool developers additionally need to have excellent programming skills and deep knowledge of optimization algorithms.
Prerequisites
A solid understanding of digital circuit design, and interest in problem formulation, and development and implementation of algorithms for circuit optimization is expected.
Core
ECE 516 IC Technologies
ECE 528 VLSI-Computer-Aided Design
ECE 529 CAD for ULSI and Emerging Technologies
ECE 583 Low Power IC Design
Depth and Breadth Course list
ECE 515 Fundamentals of Semiconductor Devices
ECE 525 Digital Integrated Circuit Design I
ECE 526 Digital Integrated Circuit Design II
ECE 527 High Performance Digital Systems
ECE 540 System on a Chip Design with FPGAs
ECE 544 Embedded System Design with FPGAs
ECE 571 Intro to System Verilog for Design and Verification
ECE 581 ASIC Modeling and Synthesis
ECE 582 Formal Verification of Hardware/Software Systems
ECE 584 Foundations of Cyber-Physical Systems
ECE 586 Computer Architecture
ECE 587 Advanced Computer Architecture I
ECE 590 Digital Design Using Hardware Description Languages
ECE 593 Fundamentals of Pre-Silicon Validation
ECE 597 Post-Silicon Electrical Validation
EE 516 Mathematical Foundations of Machine Learning
EE 519 Deep Learning Theory and Practice
ECE 510 Quantum and ML
Track Completion Forms
Program Completion Form
Thesis Program Completion Form
Track Director