Engineering Design Projects in EDA and VLSI
Samy ZafranyORT BRAUDE COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
Electronic and Electrical Engineering Department
Engineering Design Project Proposals
Here are a few proposals for Engineering Design projects which I have submitted since last year.- VLSI Floorplan Optimization with Shelf and Level Algorithms [PDF]
- DFT SCAN CELLS NETWORK DESIGN (Design For Testing) [PDF]
- VLSI Routing Flow on Topological Patterns [PDF]
- Visual Scriptable CPU Emulator [PDF]
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Cutting, Packing and VLSI Layout
This is a project by Christine L Mumford and Pearl Y Wang from the Cardiff School of Computer Science. It is a good example of the type of projects I expect students to come with.
- Hopefully, more project proposals will be available soon, although I believe it is better that students come up with their own ideas.
- Interested students are welcome to come up with new ideas and suggestions.
- WARNING: All these projects involve a substantial amount of programming and software engineering! You must have a solid background in 2 or 3 programming langauges, and a meaningful experience with software engineering projects.
- To get the full guidelines and information on the Engineering Design Process, please consult Moshe Sade (moshesade51@gmail.com), the Engineering Design Process Manager.
Project Topics
Following is a list of topics in which I may be able to mentor final Engineering projects.- Floorplanning modelling and design
- Cell Placement
- Maze routing
- Physical interconnect modelling
- Global routing
- Network Partitioning
- Detailed routing: full-chip routing and channel routing
- Specialized routing: clock routing, power routing
- Post-layout Optimizations
- Floorplanning packing and compaction
- Algorithms: divide and conquer, simulated annealing, genetic algorithms
Course Materials and Tutorials
- If you are not familiar with thse topics but still interested in doing a project in them, then you must invest a considerable time in reading and learning a few papers, book chapters, and internet course materials (it could overload your project time budget by an additional 100-150 hours).
- Lack of programming and software engineering expertise would make it almost an impossible mission unless you are highly motivated and willing to invest a lot more time than proect budget.
- To get a more in-depth acquaintance with the EDA/VLSI algorithms field, please review the following recommended course web sites: Please try to read a few presentations and papers to get a good idea of what is it about
- If you find these subjects suitable, useful, and interesting for your Engineering project, try to locate and focus on 2 or 3 interesting problems that you may want to work on
- Take into account that my main expertise is in floorplanning and routing (physical design) so that other subjects may not be relevant
- After browsing these courses, you may find more of them by Googling a proper list of keywords
- Physical Design for Nanometer ICs, Spring 2013
- EE 382V – VLSI Physical Design Automation (Spring 2011)
- EE 201A/EE201B - Modeling and Optimization for VLSI Layout
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Introduction to VLSI/SoC Physical Design Automation
(You have to change to courses frame to get to this course) - Video Course: VLSI EDA - Logic to Layout
- Eight lectures on ECAD: Introductorary course on Electronic Computer-Aided Design
