Custom design of integrated circuits is required for the development of digital standard-cell and bit-slice libraries, analog circuits, and other specialized circuits that are not commercially available. Teaching students the design and verification flow at this physical level is valuable in that it provides the understanding and skills they will need to perform these functions in their subsequ...

Interconnect has become a primary bottleneck in the integrated circuit design process. As CMOS technology is scaled, the design requirements of delay, power, bandwidth, and noise due to the on-chip interconnects have become increasingly stringent. New design challenges are continuously emerging, such as delay uncertainty induced by process and environmental variations. It has become increasingl...

Thermal effects are becoming increasingly important during integrated circuit design. Thermal characteristics influence reliability, power consumption, cooling costs, and performance. It is necessary to consider thermal effects during all levels of the design process, from the architectural level to the physical level. This is challenging because design-time temperature prediction requires acce...

ii To my dear wife, Liang iii Acknowledgments First, I would like to thank my advisor Professor Larry Pileggi for all his support and continuous guidance throughout the past five years. He opened up a wide variety of research topics that I can explore during my early years at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and helped me find my research path that eventually leads to this dissertation. Second,...

In this paper, we look at different possibilities and advantages of our early proposed hybrid planar and nonradiative dielectric (NRD) guide technology in the design of various millimeter-wave circuits. First of all, an overview of the NRD guide technology progress is presented. It indicates that the hybrid planar/NRD-guide (HP/NRDG) technology provides a straightforward assembly of MMIC circui...

In present day society where communication technologies are advancing at spiral rate, the need for efficient integrated circuit design to transmit and receive signals at unlicensed frequency spectrum is inevitable. At receiving front end, the low noise amplifier design, being the first building block to receive the signal puts a tremendous challenge on modern day radio frequency engineers to me...

A bolometer thermometer with a thermal capacity C is coupled to a temperature T. 0 through a heat conductivity G and receives the power.Bolometers made with a square mesh structure can be assembled. Show a wide feature of noise not explained by the basic theory. A bolometer is a device for measuring the power of incident electromagnetic radiation via the heating of a material with a temperature...