Lectures and Office Hours

Lectures Tues, Thurs 9:30 am - 11:00 am Virtual Borivoje Nikolic
Office Hours Mondays 4:30 pm - 5:30 pm Virtual Borivoje Nikolic
Thursdays 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm Virtual Harrison Liew

Homework

Exams

  • There will be four quizzes during the semester.
  • Final exam will be held during the last week of the course.

Course Outline

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Class Date Lecture Topic Recording Reading Lab Homework Homework Solution
1 1/19 Class Organization & Introduction to Course Content (2-up) (1-up) Recording No homework!
2 1/21 Scaling Trends (2-up) (1-up) Recording Dennard74 No homework!
3 1/26 Chipyard (2-up) (1-up) Chipyard for Labs/Project Recording Lab 1 (due 2/4) No homework!
4 1/28 Technology Features (2-up) (1-up) Recording No homework!
5 2/2 Transistor Models (2-up) (1-up) Recording Sodini84
Toh88		 No homework!
6 2/4 Delay (2-up) (1-up) Recording Sakurai90 Lab 2 (due 2/18) Homework 1 (due 2/19) HW1 Solutions
7 2/9 Leakage (2-up) (1-up) Recording
8 2/11 Standard Cells (2-up) (1-up) Recording
9 2/18 Static Timing (2-up) (1-up) Recording Lab 3 (due 3/4)
Lab 4 (due 3/18)
10 2/23 Variability (2-up) (1-up) (annotated) Recording Bowman02
11 2/25 Timing, revisited (2-up) (1-up) (annotated) Recording Partovi01 Homework 2 (due 3/11) HW2 Solutions
12 3/2 Timing, revisited (2-up) (1-up) (annotated) Recording
12.5 3/4 Continue previous lecture Recording
13 3/9 Flip-flops (2-up) (1-up) (annotated) Recording
14 3/11 Memory (2-up) (1-up) (annotated) Recording
15 3/16 SRAM (2-up) (1-up) (annotated) Recording
16 3/18 Apple Guest Lecture Lab 5 (due 4/2)
17 3/30 SRAM (2-up) (1-up) (annotated) Recording Amrutur98 Niki11 Osada04 Homework 3 (due 4/9) HW3 Solutions
18 4/1 Power-Performance Tradeoffs (2-up) (1-up) Recording Markovic04
19 4/6 Power-Performance Tradeoffs (part2) (2-up) (1-up) Recording Zyuban04 Chandrakasan95 Rabaey Ch.4
20 4/8 Dynamic Voltage Scaling (2-up) (1-up) Burd00
21 4/13 Leakage (2-up) (1-up) (annotated) Recording
22 4/15 Sleep (2-up) (1-up) (annotated) Recording Homework 4 (due 4/23) HW4 Solutions
23 4/20 Optimal Energy (2-up) (1-up)
(annotated)		 Recording
24 4/22 Clocks (2-up) (1-up) Annotated Recording Wong06
25 4/27 Wrap-up (2-up) (1-up)

Resources

Textbooks

  • Optional Low Power Design Essentials, J. Rabaey, Springer, 2009.
  • Baseline Digital Integrated Circuits: A Design Perspective, Jan M. Rabaey, Anantha Chandrakasan, Borivoje Nikolić
  • Useful CMOS VLSI Design, Neil Weste, David Harris
  • Useful Design of High-Performance Microprocessor Circuits, A. Chandrakasan, W. Bowhill, F. Fox, IEEE Press, 2001.

Staff

bora photo Borivoje Nikolic bora at berkeley dot edu
harrison photo Harrison Liew harrisonliew at berkeley dot edu

Grading

Class

Assignments 20%
Design Project 40%
Quizzes 10%
Final Exam 30%

Cheating Policy

  • If you turn in someone else’s work as if it were your own, you are guilty of cheating.  This includes problem sets, answers on exams, lab exercise checks, project design, and any required course turn-in material.
  • Also, if you knowingly aid in cheating, you are guilty.
  • We have software that compares your submitted work to others.
  • However, it is okay to discuss with others lab exercises and the project (obviously, okay to work with project partner). Okay to discuss homework with others. But everyone must turn in their own work.
  • Do not post your work on public repositories like github (private o.k.)
  • If we catch you cheating, you will get negative points on the assignment: It is better to not do the work than to cheat!  
If it is a midterm exam, final exam, or final project, you get an F in the class.  All cases of cheating reported to the office of student conduct.