This book was written in the belief that VLSI design is system design. Designing fast inverters is fun,
but designing a high-performance, cost-effective integrated circuit demands knowledge of all aspects of digital design, from application algorithms to fabrication and packaging. Carver Mead and Lynn
Conway dubbed this approach the tall-thin designer approach. Today’s hot designer is a little fatter than his or her 1979 ancestor, since we now know a lot more about VLSI design than we did when Mead and Conway first spoke. But the same principle applies: you must be well-versed in both high-level and low-level design skills to make the most of your design opportunities.
Since VLSI has moved from an exotic, expensive curiosity to an everyday necessity, universities have refocused their VLSI design classes away from circuit design and toward advanced logic and system design. Studying VLSI design as a system design discipline requires such a class to consider somewhat different set of areas than does the study of circuit design. Topics such as ALU and multiplexer design or advanced clocking strategies used to be discussed using TTL and board-level
components, with only occasional nods toward VLSI implementations of very large components.However, the push toward higher levels of integration means that most advanced logic design projects will be designed for integrated circuit implementation.
About the Author
Wayne Wolf is Rhesa “Ray” S. Farmer Jr. Distinguished Chair in Embedded Computing Systems and
Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Before joining
Georgia Tech, he was with Princeton University from 1989 to 2007 and AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1984 to 1989. He received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1980, 1981, and 1984, respectively. His research interests include VLSI systems,embedded computing, cyber-physical systems, and embedded computer vision. He has chaired several conferences, including CODES, EMSOFT, CASES, and ICCD. He was founding editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems and founding co-editor-in-chief of Design Automation for Embedded Systems. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE. He received the ASEE/CSE and HP Frederick E. Terman Award in 2003 and the IEEE Circuits and Systems Education Award in 2006.
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