Automatic generation of characterization circuits - An application in academia

Abstract

Circuit characterization is an essential topic in most integrated circuit design courses in an electronic and/or computer engineering curricula. In such courses, a standard set of basic circuits (called standard cells) needs to be characterized based on different design criteria, for example, noise margin, power, performance, etc. So the students usually need to go through the manual, iterative process of creation of circuit descriptions (defined by Spice netlists) - a process that is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors. For the students to be able to conduct a large number of experiments while focusing on the design issues rather than on the tedious task of creating different circuit variants, an online tool is being proposed. The tool can be used in different courses that cover the topics of nano-sized CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) digital design, VLSI (very large scale integrated) circuit design, low-power digital circuit design, circuit reliability, etc.