VLSI Design Courses: EE477L, EE 577a and EE 577b
Principles of VLSI design from transistor operation to gate design to complex module and system design using custom and ASIC flows are covered.
CAD Courses: EE 680 and EE 681
Topics covered in EE680 are: Physical design of digital VLSI circuits, with emphasis on problems of partitioning, placement and routing. Material related to graph theory and algorithms applicable to these layout problems will also be covered, including an overview of mathematical programming, combinatorics, graph theory, dynamic programming, branch and bound, and simulated annealing.
Topics covered in EE681 are: Logic and behavioral synthesis of digital VLSI circuits, with emphasis on problems of hardware and software co-design, resource allocation and binding, scheduling, interconnect synthesis, technology-independent logic optimizations, technology mapping and fanout optimization. Materials related to Boolean algebra, finite automata theory, Petri nets, Verilog HDL, and Binary Decision Diagrams are examples of covered topics.