Top content

Design of Microelectronic Systems
Entwurf mikroelektronischer Systeme (in German)

The course covers the design and testing of microelectronic devices based on hardware description languages. After an introduction into the different abstraction levels of system design and the definition of various quality measures, the most important target technologies for microelectronic circuits are discussed. The main part of the lecture deals with design methods that enable a safe and reusable design of microelectronic system components. Therefore, important architectural concepts and appropriate hardware descriptions, as well as synthesis methods are presented. A further focus is on scaling to future technologies and the associated need for new architectures. Furthermore, we study new on-chip communication systems and multiprocessor system on chips. The lecture concludes with methods that allow for an efficient test of the developed microelectronic components.

In the accompanying exercises, the methodologies introduced in the lecture are practically applied. Based on the hardware description language VHDL, microelectronic circuits are specified, synthesized and tested in real system environments using FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays).