Advanced Course

Basic Electronics

Mr. Rahul Sinha

 Advanced Topics- Basic Electronics

ADVANCE COURSE TOPIC

NAME OF THE SUBJECT: Basic Electronics

SEMESTER: 3rd

S.NO TOPIC

1 Recent Developments In Electronics

2 What is VLSI?

3 The VLSI design process

4 VLSI designs categories.

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 Advanced Topics- Basic Electronics

Recent Developments In Electronics

The development of integrated circuits has revolutionized the fields of communications,

information handling, and computing. Integrated circuits reduce the size of devices and lower
manufacturing and system costs, while at the same time providing high speed and increased
reliability.
Digital watches, hand-held computers, and electronic games are systems based on
microprocessors.
Other developments include the digitalization of audio signals, where the frequency and
amplitude of an audio signal are coded digitally by appropriate sampling techniques, that is,
techniques for measuring the amplitude of the signal at very short intervals. Digitally
recorded music shows a fidelity that is not possible using direct-recording methods.
Digital playback devices of this nature have already entered the home market. Digital storage
could also form the basis of home video systems and may significantly alter library storage
systems, because much more information can be stored on a disk for replay on a television
screen than can be contained in a book.

Medical electronics has progressed from computerized axial tomography, or the use of CAT
or CT scanners (see X Ray), to systems that can discriminate more and more of the organs of
the human body. Devices that can view blood vessels and the respiratory system have been
developed as well. Ultrahigh definition television also promises to substitute for many
photographic processes, because it eliminates the need for silver.
Today's research to increase the speed and capacity of computers concentrates mainly on the
improvement of integrated circuit technology and the development of even faster switching
components.

Very-large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuits that contain several hundred thousand

components on a single chip have been developed. Very-high-speed computers are being
developed in which semiconductors may be replaced by superconducting circuits using
Josephson junctions and operating at temperatures near absolute zero.
Integrated circuits developed from transistor technology as scientists sought ways to build
more transistors into a circuit. The first integrated circuits were patented in 1959 by two
Americans--Jack Kilby, an engineer, and Robert Noyce, a physicist--who worked

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independently. Integrated circuits caused as great a revolution in electronics in the 1960's as

transistors had caused in the 1950's. The circuits were first used in military equipment and
spacecraft and helped make possible the first manned space flights of the 1960's.

The first microprocessors were produced in 1971 for desktop calculators. By the mid-1970's,
microprocessors were being used in handheld calculators, video games, and home
appliances. Business and industry began to use microprocessors to control various types of
office machines, factory equipment, and other devices.
Electronics Today. Scientists and engineers continue to search for ways to make electronic
circuits smaller, faster, and more complex. Developing technologies include superconductors
and photonics.

Superconductors are materials that lose all resistance to the flow of current at low
temperatures. Superconductor devices operate extremely fast and produce almost no heat.
Scientists are testing superconducting switching devices to control computer circuits.
Photonics is the science of building circuits that use photons--tiny packets of light energy--as
signals instead of electrons. Photonic circuits use pulsed beams of photons to transmit data
and commands through optical fibers. Photonic circuits can carry huge amounts of
information, and they produce no heat. Today, the enormous information-carrying capacity
of optical fibers is opening a new era in home entertainment, communications, and computer
technology.

Display techniques in electronics are also rapidly changing. Manufacturers are developing
flatter display panels to replace the bulky cathode-ray tubes used in television and many
computer screens. One new design, introduced in 1993, uses thousands of tiny tubes side by
side to form a picture. The screen is less than 4 inches (10 centimeters) thick. Another
technology relies on even flatter LCD panels. These lightweight, energy-saving screens
could hang on a wall like a picture. Today, portable computers such as laptop and notebook
computers commonly use flat LCD screens.
In the early 1990's, manufacturers began to use a new type of liquid crystal display called the
active matrix LCD in portable computers, video games, and other electronic products. In
these displays, thousands of transistors on the inner surface of the glass control the signals
that activate the liquid crystal.

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 Advanced Topics- Basic Electronics

What is VLSI?
VLSI stands for "Very Large Scale Integration". This is the field which involves packing
more and more logic devices into smaller and smaller areas.Thanks to VLSI, circuits that
would have taken boardfuls of space can now be put into a small space few millimeters
across! This has opened up a big opportunity to do things that were not possible before. VLSI
circuits are everywhere ... your computer, your car, your brand new state-of-the-art digital
camera, the cell-phones, and what have you. All this involves a lot of expertise on many
fronts within the same field, which we will look at in later sections.

VLSI has been around for a long time, there is nothing new about it ... but as a side effect of
advances in the world of computers, there has been a dramatic proliferation of tools that can
be used to design VLSI circuits. Alongside, obeying Moore's law, the capability of an IC has
increased exponentially over the years, in terms of computation power, utilisation of
available area, yield. The combined effect of these two advances is that people can now put
diverse functionality into the IC's, opening up new frontiers. Examples are embedded
systems, where intelligent devices are put inside everyday objects, and ubiquitous computing
where small computing devices proliferate to such an extent that even the shoes you wear
may actually do something useful like monitoring your heartbeats! These two fields are kinda
related, and getting into their description can easily lead to another article.

DEALING WITH VLSI CIRCUITS

Digital VLSI circuits are predominantly CMOS based. The way normal blocks like latches
and gates are implemented is different from what students have seen so far, but the behaviour
remains the same. All the miniaturisation involves new things to consider. A lot of thought
has to go into actual implementations as well as design. Let us look at some of the factors
involved ...

1. Circuit Delays. Large complicated circuits running at very high frequencies have one big
problem to tackle - the problem of delays in propagation of signals through gates and wires ...
even for areas a few micrometers across! The operation speed is so large that as the delays
add up, they can actually become comparable to the clock speeds.

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2. Power. Another effect of high operation frequencies is increased consumption of power.

This has two-fold effect - devices consume batteries faster, and heat dissipation increases.
Coupled with the fact that surface areas have decreased, heat poses a major threat to the
stability of the circuit itself.

3. Layout. Laying out the circuit components is task common to all branches of electronics.
Whats so special in our case is that there are many possible ways to do this; there can be
multiple layers of different materials on the same silicon, there can be different arrangements
of the smaller parts for the same component and so on.

The power dissipation and speed in a circuit present a trade-off; if we try to optimise on one,
the other is affected. The choice between the two is determined by the way we chose the
layout the circuit components. Layout can also affect the fabrication of VLSI chips, making
it either easy or difficult to implement the components on the silicon.

THE VLSI DESIGN PROCESS

A typical digital design flow is as follows: Specification Architecture RTL Coding RTL
Verification Synthesis Backend Tape Out to Foundry to get end product….a wafer with
repeated number of identical Ics.

All modern digital designs start with a designer writing a hardware description of the IC
(using HDL or Hardware Description Language) in Verilog/VHDL. A Verilog or VHDL
program essentially describes the hardware (logic gates, Flip-Flops, counters etc) and the
interconnect of the circuit blocks and the functionality. Various CAD tools are available to
synthesize a circuit based on the HDL. The most widely used synthesis tools come from two
CAD companies. Synposys and Cadence.

Without going into details, we can say that the VHDL, can be called as the "C" of the VLSI
industry. VHDL stands for "VHSIC Hardware Definition Language", where VHSIC stands
for "Very High Speed Integrated Circuit". This languages is used to design the circuits at a

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high-level, in two ways. It can either be a behavioural description, which describes what the
circuit is supposed to do, or a structural description, which describes what the circuit is made
of. There are other languages for describing circuits, such as Verilog, which work in a similar
fashion.

Both forms of description are then used to generate a very low-level description that actually
spells out how all this is to be fabricated on the silicon chips. This will result in the
manufacture of the intended IC.A typical analog design flow is as follows: In case of analog
design, the flow changes somewhat. Specifications Architecture Circuit Design SPICE
Simulation Layout Parametric Extraction / Back Annotation Final Design Tape Out to
foundry.

While digital design is highly automated now, very small portion of analog design can be
automated. There is a hardware description language called AHDL but is not widely used as
it does not accurately give us the behavioral model of the circuit because of the complexity
of the effects of parasitic on the analog behavior of the circuit. Many analog chips are what
are termed as “flat” or non-hierarchical designs. This is true for small transistor count chips
such as an operational amplifier, or a filter or a power management chip. For more complex
analog chips such as data converters, the design is done at a transistor level, building up to a
cell level, then a block level and then integrated at a chip level. Not many CAD tools are
available for analog design even today and thus analog design remains a difficult art. SPICE
remains the most useful simulation tool for analog as well as digital design.

VLSI DESIGNS CATEGORIES

1. Analog:
Small transistor count precision circuits such as Amplifiers, Data converters, filters,
Phase Locked Loops, Sensors etc.

2. ASICS or Application Specific Integrated Circuits:

Progress in the fabrication of IC's has enabled us to create fast and powerful circuits
in smaller and smaller devices. This also means that we can pack a lot more of
functionality into the same area. The biggest application of this ability is found in the

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design of ASIC's. These are IC's that are created for specific purposes - each device is
created to do a particular job, and do it well. The most common application area for
this is DSP - signal filters, image compression, etc. To go to extremes, consider the
fact that the digital wristwatch normally consists of a single IC doing all the time-
keeping jobs as well as extra features like games, calendar, etc.

3. SoC or Systems on a chip:

These are highly complex mixed signal circuits (digital and analog all on the same
chip). A network processor chip or a wireless radio chip is an example of an SoC.

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