Why this book?

Designing integrated electronics has become a multidisciplinary enterprise that involves solving problems from fields as disparate as

• Hardware architecture

• Software engineering

• Marketing and investment

• Solid-state physics

• Systems engineering

• Circuit design

• Discrete mathematics

• Electronic design automation

• Layout design

• Hardware test equipment and measurement techniques

Covering all these subjects is clearly beyond the scope of this text and also beyond the author's proficiency. Yet, I have made an attempt to collect material from the above fields that I have found to be relevant for deciding whether or not to develop digital Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) circuits, for making major design decisions, and for carrying out the actual engineering work.

The present volume has been written with two audiences in mind. As a textbook, it wants to introduce engineering students to the beauty and the challenges of digital VLSI design while preventing them from repeating mistakes that others have made before. Practising electronics engineers should find it appealing as a reference book because of its comprehensiveness and the many tables, checklists, diagrams, and case studies intended to help them not to overlook important action items and alternative options when planning to develop their own hardware components.

What sets this book apart from others in the field is its top-down approach. Beginning with hardware architectures, rather than with solid-state physics, naturally follows the normal VLSI design flow and makes the material more accessible to readers with a background in systems engineering, information technology, digital signal processing, or management.