ECE CORE: Adventure of a lifetime

If you're a practicing verification engineer or an aspiring verification engineer, the best gift you can give to yourself would be the skill of Formal Verification . In ever expanding complexity of systems and increasing demand of Silicon industry, Formal Verification is the shovel that could help you ride this gold rush.  In the following post we will cover the MOST frequently asked questions about Formal Verification: 1. What is Formal Verification, how it solves, how it is different from Dynamic verification 2. Randomness in Formal Verification and automated stimulus generation 3. What is COI(Cone of Influence)? 4. How to write a property in Formal? How it verifies? How it works? 5. What are formal engines? 6. Non convergence of Formal properties? How to converge them – Abstraction techniques? 1. What is Formal Verification, how it solves, how it is different from Dynamic verification To understand Formal Verification we first need to understand what exactly is verification and

  A verification engineer is a detective for Silicon – a Formal verification engineer is a verification engineer on steroids. If you Google, “ How much time is spent on verification in RTL Development ?” You will find yourself uttering one of the many adjectives of great surprise! Design Verification takes almost 80% of the overall time spent on chip development and verification engineers lose hair, sleep, peace, patience and a pinch of weekends on tight deadlines to deliver the quality of verification. Any attempts to cut short the efforts or expedite the process is a giant leap in correct direction. Formal verification is rising and shining like a superhero in the ever-growing complex field of verification. It is the ring of power in the current market and surely gives a boost to your career in FrontEnd Verification . Being skilled in Formal Verification ensures you a ticket to be highly employable in semiconductors at-least for the next decade.  Formal Verification is an adva

If you are reading this article, you have already experienced VLSI in it’s finest. VLSI or Very Large Scale Integration is a highly technical field. You can assume it as SPHINX of technology which has wings of programming, head of a researcher and body of detective and tail of a technician . The field focuses on integration of millions of transistors into a smaller package and make that sophisticated package work! These packages are affectionately called “ chips ”. People love these chips, and these chips like to be addressed as SoC or ASICs . IC Design Flow                                            VLSI industry is sapiosexual and hence require special understanding and grasp of subjects to be impressed. Entering VLSI industry is tough, but it becomes excruciatingly harder if you don’t know your battle. First step while choosing your battles is to understand the battle ground, knowing your enemy and then prepare your arsenal. As the saying goes, “ You don’t bring knives to a gun fi

Stability is what we generally crave for - in profession , in life , in circuits , in amplifiers , and the list is endless . Just as any other thing in life, nothing comes free and there's always a trade-off associated. Rightly put " You can't have your cake and eat it too ". In the previous post we have seen how the Feedback works and how it has unlocked a whole new world.                                              Now we will be discussing about how to make our systems stable. More importantly, why is it even desired? While we apply feedback, it is important to also consider Stability. Sometimes, we need to frequency compensate amplifiers to ensure the stability.  To address the situation and topic in hand, you may refer the following handwritten notes:  HANDWRITTEN_NOTES Recommended Book :  Razavi   (Chapter-12.8)   Recommended Course(FREE) : PLAYLIST   (Lecture - 43,44,45) I have covered the complete strategy to crack VLSI jobs along with thorough notes in this

  When input signal to an amplifier is in the range of 10-100 KHz we use small signal-low frequency model of the transistor for analysis. With increasing frequency 📈 , internal capacitance of the transistor starts affecting its performance strongly 📏 . A low frequency model cannot work well in this situation 🚧 . To accommodate these performance changes of the transistor, a separate model is developed for high frequency operations. In the following handwritten notes I have covered the most important topics in detail : * 💡 High frequency model of BJT * 💡 High frequency model of MOSFET * 💡 Miller Effect * 💡 Different approaches to do Frequency Analysis * 💡 Input Capacitance and Output impedances * 💡 Frequency response of differential circuits, cascaded stages, MOS cascode Click the following link for the notes: HANDWRITTEN_NOTES I have covered the complete strategy to crack VLSI jobs along with thorough notes in the this blog. I will be regularly sharing best resources for prepa

  “Mirror, Mirror on the wall Who’s the Fairest of them all” I am sure this rings the bells of Snow White’s tale. In VLSI we have the Current Mirrors, just as fair and just as much the root cause of some complex shenanigans. They come with their amigos – Cascode and Differential Circuits, a perfect pair to short the fuse of your brain.   When it comes to becoming a proficient Analog Engineer, it is a MUST to be well versed with Differential Circuits, Current Mirrors and Cascode circuits. The following handwritten notes got you covered where I have covered all these topics in great depth: CURRENT_MIRROR_DIFFERENTIAL_CKT_NOTES   Suggested Reading : Razavi, Behzad. Design of Analog CMOS IntegratedCircuits  (Chapter - 9 & 10) I have covered the complete strategy to crack VLSI jobs along with thorough notes in this blog. I will be regularly sharing best resources for preparation as well as upskilling. Please share this blog in your network – hopefully this could help someone achiev

 Electronics is simply magical! Instead of unicorns, we have Op-Amps. Their existence is a mystery for layman but feels no less than a powerful spell of the spellbinder viz the core VLSI engineers.                                                        Considering virtual ground, shape shifting abilities (to behave as resistive, capacitive, or both) and being humble enough to be available for array of problems (signal conditioning, filtering or other mathematical operations), no wonder Op-Amps are a hot topic for interviews.                                                                  The following handwritten notes covers this fascinating topic in-depth:  OP_AMP_NOTES Recommended Worksheet: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/worksheets/basic-operational-amplifiers/ I have covered the complete strategy to crack VLSI jobs along with thorough notes in this blog. I will be regularly sharing best resources for preparation as well as upskilling. Please share this blog in your n

When it comes to clearing VLSI interviews and written rounds, most of the companies check your proficiency in Digital Electronics. Mostly restricted to testing CMOS for digital logic designs but if you’re interested in Analog roles of VLSI-giants like TI, Synopsys, STMicroelectronics, etc – you need to have sound knowledge of BJTs along with the MOSFETs.  The following handwritten notes captures all the important topics in one place:  * Operations, properties and biasing of BJT * I-V characteristics * Small signal and Large Signal operations * Topologies : CE, CB, CC  * Rin, Rout, Gain calculations, Impedance Please refer to this link to get the Handwritten notes: BJT_NOTES Follow me on LinkedIn and subscribe to this blog to get more insightful content.  LinkedIn