IDESA — Implementation of widespread IC design skills in advanced deep submicron technologies at European universities

Project coordinator
Interuniversitair Micro-Electronica Centrum VZW, Belgium.

Partners
Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland; Technische Universiteit Delft, Netherlands; The Science and Technology Facilities Council, United Kingdom; Slovenska Technicka Univerzita v Bratislave, Slovak Republic; Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium; Commisariat a L`Energie Atomique, France.

Aim of project
For advanced CMOS technologies (90 nm and beyond) a lot of new issues relating to performance and yield are becoming very important and they affect the design and implementation fl ow in major ways. The industry response includes new design methodologies and EDA tools that have been introduced to address these issues. Unfortunately, universities do not have experience or incentives or resources to independently follow these trends. The purpose of IDESA is to develop and make available didactic training materials on the design flow for integrated circuits for advanced deep submicron technologies, for the benefi t of European universities. This will bring universities to a more advanced level of implementation skills to start engaging in 65 and 45 nm designs.

Expected results
There will be a road show of 4 different advanced implementation courses that will tour different sites in Europe. These courses will be hands-on courses using the trainthe- trainer philosophy. The project consortium will also build a portfolio of public domain didactic seminars, addressing issues that are not addressed in the design fl ow courses but that will start to be of dominant importance for the 65 and 45 nm generation design flows. This seminar portfolio will be supplemented with fully documented didactic lab exercise-material that can be reused in curricula of European engineering students. The goal is to cover 32 topics in this portfolio.