Course Schedule

The class is designed to provide students with an experience of the complete IC design process in the industry from product definition to production and measurement.  Taking a product in the market as an example, students are going to re-design the chip all the way from system definition, protocol design, selecting technology, installing technology file, digital building block design, analog building block design, digital analogy integration, ESD protection, post-design simulation, and tape out process.  After that, the students will perform on-wafer testing, failure analysis, package selection, PCB design, test vector generation, reliability screening, ESD testing and data-sheet writing.  Students completing this class are expected to have the equivalent experience of completing a full IC design cycle in the industry.

This course aims to introduce you to the fundamental principles of engineering thinking and its application in research and entrepreneurship. Throughout the course, you will explore the creative process of generating ideas, formulating problems, and finding solutions through research. Additionally, you will learn how to identify the unique value of a solution and its potential for commercialization. The course will cover a wide range of topics, including creative thinking, idea generation, intellectual property, funding acquisition, presentation skill, legal procedures, branding, and team management. By the end of the course, you will have gained a preliminary understanding of the engineering innovation process and the skills and knowledge necessary to transform an idea into a successful business venture.

System on Chip (SoC) Design is a comprehensive course focusing on integrating and optimizing the four essential components of an SoC: processor, memory, interconnect, and peripherals. Through theoretical lectures and hands-on labs using open-sourced SoC designs like Caravel SoC, students will gain practical experience in hardware and software co-design. The final project will challenge students to design a workload-optimized SoC. Given a workload comprising CPU computation and IO processing tasks, students will design accelerated hardware components to optimize performance.  
Upon completing this course, students will possess the knowledge and skills necessary to design and optimize complex SoCs, enabling them to tackle real-world challenges in embedded systems development, IoT, and consumer electronics.

In today's rapidly changing semiconductor industry, designing high-performance and reliable analog ICs is essential. Under CMOS technology scaling, reliability (e.g., electrostatic discharge and latch-up) is degraded by device structures and stronger parasitic elements, and the analog performance is affected by short-channel effects, layout-dependent effects, and random process variations. Throughout this course, students will explore how the above factors impact the analog circuit performance and reliability, and learn both the theories and the industrial practices to address these problems.

Pre-requisite: EESM5100
Exclusion: ELEC4010O