VLSI Design Facility

The VLSI design facility occupies approximately 100 metres-squared of air-conditioned space, with networked SPARC and UltraSPARC computer workstations and a variety of graphics plotters, printers and other computer peripherals.

Design automation tools available to designers include commercially-available software: Cadence, Synopsys, HSPICE and Analogy/Saber.

Test facilities include probe-stations, device parameter analyzers, and other computer-controlled analog and digital circuit and system test equipment.

The objectives of the design facility are

• to provide an environment in which research in VLSI chip design can be carried out
• to expose graduate students to the most up-to-date tools and techniques in VLSI design with the intention of making them more relevant to industry
• to interface most effectively with the Canadian microelectronics industry which has a growing interest in VLSI.

The facility is used for research purposes as well as to teach in-house graduate courses and courses offered to industry. Designs implemented using the facility have been successfully fabricated on silicon at Nortel, CMC, SGS Thomson, Wafer Scale Integration, and Philips Research Labs, and on gallium arsenide at Triquint and Nortel.

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