Course Number:

Credit Hours:

4

Course Title:

VLSI Architecture

Course Description:

Augments the physical-level VLSI design knowledge built in ECE G353 by studying how to take advantage of VLSI technologies. Provides students with the opportunity to go through the design process of VLSI architectures with two architectural-level design projects. Prior project examples include the design and evaluation of FPGAs, application specific processors, and microprocessors. Emphasizes performance and cost tradeoffs and decision making in these projects. Lectures provide theories and discussions to support these design projects that include a brief review of VLSI design methodology, pipelining and parallel processing in VLSI processors, interconnection between VLSI processing units, VLSI-oriented algorithms and applications, VLSI architecture synthesis, such special VLSI architectures as synchronous and asynchronous processor arrays and massively parallel fine-grained processor arrays, and reconfigurable VLSI architectures.