Tsividis Y. Mixed Analog-digital VLSI Devices and Technology

Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Company, 2002. - 296 p.Mixed analog-digital chips are now commonplace. They can be found in a variety of applications, from TV sets and compact disk players to automobiles, telephony equipment, and the disk drive of personal computers. The successful design of such chips requires, in addition to knowledge of circuits and systems, a background in device models, fabrication technology, and layout, with the special considerations that apply to analog and mixed analog-digital circuits. This book has been written to provide this background. It aims at providing just the information missing in this respect from digital VLSI textbooks and, in large part, even from traditional analog IC design textbooks and courses. The book emphasizes intuition and practical information that is found to be useful in the development of correctly working chips. Although the book does not exhaust the subject, it does contain enough information for a good start. After reading the book, one should be able to answer questions that keep coming up in design settings in universities and companies—for example, why simulations disagree with hand calculations and with experimental results; where common simulator models, appropriate for digital circuits, fail for analog circuits, why and what to do about it; what are the limits of strong inversion in MOS transistors, and what happens outside such limits; how to model devices at nanoampere levels for low-power design; what are the frequency limits of validity of common device models found in simulators; what devices other than transistors are provided in common fabrication processes, and what the performance of such devices is; how to lay out transistors, resistors, and capacitors for good matching; how far two devices can be on the chip before matching between them deteriorates; and how to prevent interference from the digital circuits to the analog circuits on the same chip.