Some Basic Concepts of Analog IC Design (©Fuding Ge)

Some Basic Concepts you should know before job hounting:

You should grasp the following concepts:

• Gain, (how to improve gain?)

• Bandwidth, (how to improve bandwidth?)

• Feedback,(Stability is a must ask question! Know pole, zero, gain and phase margin!)

• Slew rate,(How to improve slew rate?)

• Offset,(how to eliminate offset? Chopper stabilized circuits, autozero)

• Noise,(what is thermal, flick, shot noise? What are the noises of BJT and MOSFET? (Tell me one way to reduce flick noise)

• Compensation (what is Miller, lead and Lag compensation? Know what is Miller Effects).

• Layout (centroid, interdigital) (how to improve the match of current mirror, differential pairs?

Remember: Same Structure (poly-poly not one is poly-poly another is poly-metal), same temperature, same Shape and size, same orientation (current flow parallel), same surroundings(dummy transistors) and Common-centroid geometry (fingers, interdigitated fingers, what is the purpose of breaking into fingers?))

Suggested Reading: Koen Lampaert, Georges Gielen and Willy Sansen, Analog Layout Generation for Performance and Manufacturability, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999

• Thermal resistance (basic calculation).

• Filter

• Oscillator

• Peak detector

• Frequency divider

• Bandgap Reference

• You also need to know a little bit about testing, for example DFT.

(I will later provide more details for each of the concepts.)

Some Basic Concepts of Analog IC Design (©Fuding Ge)

Recommended Courses to Take for Analog IC Design (©Fuding Ge)

Courses:
You must take the following courses:
• Device physics
• Analog circuits analysis and design
• Advanced analog IC design
• A/D converter
• Digital circuits analysis
• VLSI design
• Filter design
• PLL design
• RF circuit design

You better to take the following courses if Available:
• Semiconductor and device characterization
• VLSI Architecture
• Computer architecture
• VHDL
• Logic Design

(I will find time to provide link to openly accessed course websites/notes later.)

Recommended Courses to Take for Analog IC Design (©Fuding Ge)

Will post Job Hunting Guide, including interview questions, written by Fuding Ge

As I found out recently, that Fuding Ge's personal website (http://geocities.com/fudingge/jobguide.html) originally held on Yahoo Geocities cannot be accessed, since Yahoo does not provide service of personal website anymore.

I contacted Fuding Ge, and he allows me to post his Job Hunting Guide, including his interview questions, on my blog. I will do so soon. Please note that all the materials written by Fuding Ge are copyrighted by him, as originally indicated in his website.

Furthermore, I plan to elaborate on his Job Hunting Guide, and also answer his interview questions one by one, in my future blog posts.

Will post Job Hunting Guide, including interview questions, written by Fuding Ge

Free device model parameters for analog IC simulation - Predictive Technology Model, and etc.

http://www.eas.asu.edu/~ptm/
http://ptm.asu.edu/

Though the device parameters are not measured from the real devices, they can be used for simulation (within reasonable tolerance?).
Will read it for more details.

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Another related website http://www.mos-ak.org/

At its "Modeling Links", there are several related links to device modeling websites.

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In http://www.idea2ic.com/index.html, search for "BSIM4 simplified", you can also find information of device modeling, including the comparison between various device parameters with different lengths (180nm down to 22nm) in PDF.

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1um and 50nm MOSFET models, provided by R. Jacob Baker:
http://cmosedu.com/cmos1/cmosedu_models.txt

Free device model parameters for analog IC simulation - Predictive Technology Model, and etc.