In this paper, a threshold voltage (VT) cancellation circuit for neuron-MOS (νMOS) analog circuits is described. By connecting the output terminal of this circuit with one of the input terminals of the νMOS transistor, cancellation ofVT is realized. The circuit has advantages of ground-referenced output and is insensitive to the fluctuation of bias and supply voltages. Second-order effects, such as the channel length modulation effect, the mobility reduction effect and device mismatch of the proposed circuit are analyzed in detail. Low-power and high-swing νMOS cascode current mirror is presented as an application. Performance of the proposed circuits is confirmed by HSPICE simulation with MOSIS 2. 0 µ p-well double-poly and double-metal CMOS device parameters.

We propose a new method for verifying synchronous circuits using the Boyer-Moore Theorem Prover (BMTP) based on an efficient use of induction. The method contains two techniques. The one is the representation method of signals. Each signal is represented not as a waveform, but as a time parameterized function. The other is the mechanical transformation of the circuit description. A simple description of the logical connection of the components of a circuit is transformed into such a form that is not only acceptable as a definition of BMTP but also adequate for applying induction. We formalize the method and show that it realizes an efficient proof.

This paper presents a method to examine the effect of introducing data application services on existing wireless CDMA networks where conventional voice communications service is being provided. Since the total number of channels used in a cell is limited in the interfering cellular environments, some voice-traffic channels should be sacrificed when an additional channel is introduced for data services. We investigate this trade-off by analyzing the interference the forward link channels generate. It is also an objective of this paper to examine the forward link capacity in terms of the numbers of paging and voice-/data-traffic channels so as to determine the impact of introducing data services via paging and traffic channels. Different capacity regions are plotted for various cellular environments.

The EMC-adequate design of microelectronic systems includes all actions intended to eliminate electromagnetic interference in electronic systems. Challenges faced in the microelectronic area include a growing system complexity, high integration levels and higher operating speeds at all levels of integration (chip, MCM, printed circuit board and system). The growing complexity, denser design and higher speed all lead to a substantial increase in EMC problems and accordingly the design time. EMC is not commonly accepted as a vital topic in microelectronic design. Microelectronic designers often are of the opinion that EMC is limited to electrical and electronic systems and the mandatory product regulations instead of setting requirements also for the integrated circuit they are designing. In this contribution a concept for an EMC-adequate design of electronic systems will be introduced. This concept is based on a generalized development process to integrate EMC-constraints into the system design. A prototype of an environment to analyse signal integrity effects on PCB based on a workflow oriented integration approach will be presented. Based on this approach the generation of user specific design and analysis environments including various set of EMC-tools is possible.

Clothoid or cornu spiral segments were used as transition spirals forming C-and S-shaped curves between circles as well as straight lines in various situations of highway road design. These transitions are the center lines of rail, highway road design. The above C and S-shaped form curves consist one or more transition segments. We study the possibility of using the single transition spirals in the situations that use many transition spirals to form smooth transition spline between circles as well as straight lines. We also compute the bounds for the scaling of such single spirals using the practical equation. This paper is aimed to give a method avoiding non-linear equations by finding range for the scaling factor of the clothoids which can take initially an appropriate closer value from this range.

We have previously proposed a scannable memory configuration which is useful in testing logic blocks around memory arrays. Although the configuration is supposed to be effective in testing the memory array itself by its frequent read/write access during the scan operation, it has not been theoretically shown what types of faults can be detected. In this paper, from a viewpoint of memory testing, we investigate the testability of the scannable memory configuration and propose a memory array test using the scan path. It is shown that we can detect (1) all stuck-at faults in memory cells, (2) all stuck-at faults in address decoders, (3) all stuck-at faults in read/write logic, (4) static, dynamic and 2-coupling faults between memory cells of adjacent words, and (5) static coupling faults between memory cells in the same word. The test can be accomplished simply by comparing scan-in data and scan-out data. The test vector is 20ms bit long, where m is the number of words of the memory array under test and s is the total scan path length.

We propose a top-down approach for cosimulation of hardware/software co-designs for embedded systems and introduce a component logical bus architecture as an interface between software components implemented by processors and hardware components implemented by custom logic circuits. Co-simulation using a component logical bus architecture is possible is the same environment from the stage at which the processor is not yet finalized to the stage at which the processor is modeled in register transfer language. Models based upon a component logical bus architecture can be circulated and reused. We further describe experimental results of our approach.

In this paper we propose a comprehensive approach to physical design based on the constraint paradigm. Bounds on the most critical circuit parasitics are automatically generated to help designers and/or physical design tools meet a set of high-level specifications. The constraint generation engine is based on constrained optimization, where various parasitic effects on interconnect and devices are accounted for and dealt with in different manners according to their statistical behavior and their effect on performance.

After analyzing the limitations of the traditional description of CMOS circuits at the gate level, this paper introduces the notions of switching and signal variables for describing the switching states of MOS transistors and signals in CMOS circuits, respectively. Two connection operations for describing the interaction between MOS transistors and signals and a new description for MOS circuits at the switch level are presented. This new description can be used to express the functional relationship between inputs and the output at the switch level. It can also be used to describe the circuit structure composed of MOS switches. The new description can be effectively used to design both CMOS circuits and nMOS pass transistor circuits.

This paper proposes a new approach that makes it possible for every undergraduate student to perform experiments of developing a Ipipelined RISC processor within limited time available for the course. The approach consists of 4 steps. At the first step, every student implements by himself/herself a pipelined RISC processor which is based on a given, very simple model; it has separate buses for instruction and data memory ("Harvard architecture") to avoid structural hazard, while it completely ignores data control hazards to make implementation easy. Although it is such a "defective" processor, we can test its functionality by giving object code containing sufficient amount of NOP instructions to avoid hazards. At the second step, NOP instructions are deleted and behavior of the developed processor is observed carefully to understand data and control hazards. At the third step, benchmark problems are provided, and every student challenges to improve its performance. Finally every student is requested to present how he/she improved the processor. This paper also describes a new educational FPGA board ASAver.1 which is useful for experiments from introductory class to computer architecture/system class. As a feasibility study, a 16-bit pipelined RISC processor "ASAP-O" has been developed which has eight 16-bit general purpose registers, a 16-bit program counter, and a zero flag, with 10 essential instructions.

In VLSI and printed wiring board design, routing process usually consists of two stages: the global routing and the detailed routing. The routability checking is to decide whether the global wires can be transformed into the detailed ones or not. In this paper, we propose two graphs, the capacity checking graph and the initial flow graph, for efficient routability checking in planar layouts.

In layout design of transport-processing FPGAs, it is required that not only routing congestion is kept small but also circuits implemented on them operate with higher operation frequency. This paper extends the proposed simultaneous placement and global routing algorithm for transport-processing FPGAs whose objective is to minimize routing congestion and proposes a new algorithm in which the length of each critical signal path (path length) is limited within a specified upper bound imposed on it (path length constraint). The algorithm is based on hierarchical bipartitioning of layout regions and LUT (Look Up Table) sets to be placed. In each bipartitioning, the algorithm first searches the paths with tighter path length constraints by estimating their path lengths. Second the algorithm proceeds the bipartitioning so that the path lengths of critical paths can be reduced. The algorithm is applied to transport-processing circuits and compared with conventional approaches. The results demonstrate that the algorithm satisfies the path length constraints for 11 out of 13 circuits, though it increases routing congestion by an average of 20%. After detailed routing, it achieves 100% routing for all the circuits and decreases a circuit delay by an average of 23%.

Based on a new search strategy using circuit simulation and simulated annealing with local search, a design tool is proposed to automate design or tuning process for CMOS operational amplifiers. A special-purpose circuit simulator and some heuristics are used to accomplish the design within reasonable time. For arbitrary circuit topology and specifications, the discrete optimization of cost function is performed by global and local search. Through the comparision of design results and the design of a low-power high-speed CMOS operational amplifier usable in 10-b 25-MHz pipelined A/D converters, it has been demonstrated that this tool can be used for designing high-performance operational amplifiers with less design knowledge and effort.

Key technologies are presented for enhancing the reusability of software in communication switching node systems along with the results obtained from porting software between several types of node systems, including N-ISDN, B-ISDNs, and Intelligent Networks. A reusable software platform based on object-oriented designing and programming techniques has been established and mechanisms for reusing object classes has been developed. Analysis of the reusability showed that this platform can be applied to various types of communication systems and that an average of more than three quarters of a system's programs can be ported. By using our software reuse framework to develop software components, we were able to reduce the time needed to develop device management programs by about 30%. Furthermore, about 80% of these programs can be ported to other systems, so introducing this platform improves software programming productivity.

This paper presents an event-driven approach to the timing verification of latch-synchronized systems. The proposed method performs critical path extraction and timing error detection at the same time, and extracts the critical path only if necessary. By doing so, the complexity of analysis is reduced and efficiency is greatly improved over the conventional approaches which detect timing errors after extracting the complete critical paths of the system. Experimental results show that, compared to the existing methods, it provides a more than 12-fold improvement in speed on the average for ISCAS benchmark circuits, and the relative efficiency of analysis improves as the circuit size grows.

This paper presents a clock routing technique called Balanced-Mesh Method (BMM) which incorporates the advantages of two famous conventional-clock-routing techniques. One is the balanced-tree method (BTM) where the clock net is routed as a tree so that the delay times of clock signal are balanced, and the other is the fixed-mesh method (FMM) where the clock net is routed as a fixed mesh driven by a large buffer. In BMM, the clock net is routed as a set of relatively small meshes of interconnects driven by relatively small buffers. Each mesh covers an area called a Mesh-Routing Region (MR) in which its delay and skew can be suppressed within a certain range. These small meshes are connected by a balanced tree with the chip clock source as its root. To implement BMM, we developed an MR-partitioning program that partitions the circuit into MR's according to a set of pre-determined constraints on the number of flip-flops and the area in each MR, and a clock-global-routing program that provides each mesh routing and the tree routing connecting meshes. We applied BMM to the design of an MPEG2-encoder LSI and achieved a skew of 210ps. In addition, the experimental results show BMM yields the lowest power dissipation compared to conventional methods.

New network survivability measures are developed and compared with conventional ones. The advantages of using multiple survivability measures, including the new ones, are discussed. The measures are illustrated and interpreted through several numerical examples. We also show how survivability can be included as a constraint in network optimization models.

This paper reviews analog LSI design issues for optical transmission applications; covering ultra-high-speed transmission over 10 Gb/s, multi-Gb/s systems, optical interconnection systems, and optical access. In the future system development, further advancements in not only optical device technology but also LSI technology are eagerly required. More and more sophisticated circuit design techniques are needed to lower power and operation voltage, increase integration, eliminate external elements and adjustments.

In this paper, we give a concrete example of a 10-bit video rate ADC and introduce the effect of top-down design methodology with analog-HDL from the viewpoint of utilization techniques. First, we explain that analog top-down design methodology can improve chip performance by optimizing the architecture. Next, we concretely discuss the importance of modeling and verification. Verification of the full system does not require extracting all the information for each block at the transistor level in detail. The flexible verification method that we propose can provide good and fast full chip verification. We think analog top-down disign methodology will become increasingly more important from now on because "system-on-chip" requires one chip mixed-signal system LSIs.

This paper describes the design and evaluation of fully scannable embedded memory arrays. A memory array, such as a register file, is made scannable by adding a small auxiliary circuit including a counter and multiplexers. Plural memory arrays can be chained into a single scan path along with ordinary flip-flops. Detailed configuration and implementation of the scannable CMOS and bipolar LCML register file macros are discussed. The overhead ratio of the CMOS register file macro with 16-word by 16-bit results in an 8.6% transistor count and a 6.4% die area. The access time overhaead is 7.8% and the set-up time increases by about 50ps. Bipolar LCML register file macros have been applied to gate array LSIs which have successfully achieved average stuck-at fault coverage of 99.2%.