Learning from VLSI Design Experience - Tapa dura

This book shares with readers practical design knowledge gained from the author’s 24 years of IC design experience. The author addresses issues and challenges faced commonly by IC designers, along with solutions and workarounds. Guidelines are described for tackling issues such as clock domain crossing, using lockup latch to cross clock domains during scan shift, implementation of scan chains across power domain, optimization methods to improve timing, how standard cell libraries can aid in synthesis optimization, BKM (best known method) for RTL coding, test compression, memory BIST, usage of signed Verilog for design requiring +ve and -ve calculations, state machine, code coverage and much more. Numerous figures and examples are provided to aid the reader in understanding the issues and their workarounds.

Weng Fook Lee is a distinguished Technical Director at Emerald Systems Design Center with 25 years of IC Design experience. Lee has vast experience in designing with Verilog and VHDL, and is an internationally acknowledged expert in the field of RTL coding and logic synthesis for ASIC/FPGA/SOC. Lee is an expert in synthesizing and tweaking synthesis for performance and low power, leading enhanced methodology to address advanced DFT techniques for VDSM technology, development and deployment of low power standard cell libraries. Lee have lead the development of new architectures and micro-architectures for efficient PMSM motion control ASIC and have developed architectures for AI classification algorithms implementation in ASIC. Lee published “VHDL Coding and Logic Synthesis with Synopsys" with Academic Press Publication, US (ISBN: 0-12-440651-3) in May 2000, "Verilog Coding for Logic Synthesis" with John Wiley Publication, US (ISBN: 0-471-42976-7) in April 2003, “VLIW Microprocessor Hardware Design for ASICs and FPGA” with McGraw Hill Publication, US (ISBN: 978-0071497022) in Aug 2007. Lee is also the inventor and co-inventor of 14 design patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office.