Questions tagged [chip-design]
Anything related to the design of integrated circuits (chips).
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Zero Voltage in a power semiconductor chip
In an ON-mode silicon IGBT chip operating within a real power module, is the collector contact fixed at 0 V or emitter?
What about Power SiC MOSFET?
enter link description here
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2answers
77 views
Addressing 45 Inputs Down to 6 pin Output
I'm looking for a chip which could minimize ~45 button inputs down to an 6 pin input for use with Raspberry Pi.
I know this is a simple problem and it has likely been solved before, but as an ...
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0answers
26 views
Temperature-dependent leakage current in IGBTs
On one hand, the leakage current of power electronics modules such as IGBTs depends on the temperature. On the other hand, the temperature distribution on the IGBT chips is significantly non-uniform ...
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1answer
31 views
Are there ways/technologies to use High negative voltages in flash memories?
I am using an FGMOSFET with tunneling gate and control gate as an analog memory for simulation in SPICE. I use -25V to inject electrons into the floating gate and 25V to remove electrons. Everything ...
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2answers
91 views
What is this? Identifying Proximity Sensor Chip (IR)
I am in a bit of a pickle. If anyone could help/has any ideas I will be very grateful - am aware this post is pretty long but thought if anyone was clever enough to know it would be you guys. If ...
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0answers
63 views
Delamination in Pb-free solder joints
It is worth knowing that two material types are commonly used for soldering power semiconductor chips (IGBT, MOSFET, ...) to DBC substrate inside power electronics modules. They are Pb-rich and Pb-...
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0answers
49 views
Non-uniform temperatue distribution
Please assume a semiconductor chip like IGBT or MOSFET heated by a specific power loss. It is found that the more the power loss is, the more severe the chip's temperature distribution non-uniformity ...
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0answers
57 views
Uneven chip temperature
When injecting a uniform power dissipation in a chip of IGBT power electronics modules by finite element method (FEM) in COMSOL (a good software for thermal analysis), a non-uniform temperature ...
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3answers
8k views
Why are chip designers called “triangle pushers”?
I heard chip designers being described as "triangle pushers," the idea being that somehow the logic on the chip was formulated by arranging triangles on the silicon in certain ways. How does this work?...
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1answer
194 views
Good practices for full-custom IC measurement? [closed]
I am a Junior Analog IC Designer and I want to characterize a full-custom IC. The thing is that I want to do it well and I don't know any reference with good practices and PCB design guidelines for ...
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1answer
98 views
In modern CPUs, is the etched chip face-up in the packaging?
I know that the integrated circuits of the 1980s had the etched chip glued face-up inside the packaging, with tiny gold wires bridging the open space from the top surface of the chip, down to contact ...
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2answers
240 views
How do I attach an IC chip to a DIN rail? [closed]
I am using a 74AHCT125N to shift up voltage of pwm signal. The problem we are having is how to attach this chip to DIN rail. We were thinking of using a DIN rail mounted PCB. I am looking for ...
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1answer
85 views
QFN-like package identification
Can anybody identify this package? Looks like a sort of QFN to me but it's not square and I have not been able to find anything like it.
The chip itself is proprietary, no datasheet available for it.
...
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2answers
1k views
What is standard about standard cells in layout designing? [closed]
Why are standard cells called 'standard' cells? Why couldn't it be just cells? What is Standard about them? (I'm talking about the common terminology used in layout designing wherein the standard ...
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3answers
298 views
Design of 7400 Series IC
Why is pin number 7 GND and 14 VCC in 7400 ICs ( logic gate ICs) ? Could the designer have put VCC and GND in some other pin number? Is there a constraint for that specific number? (Except a few cases,...
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1answer
61 views
PN53x with emulate nfc
I saw that many of nfc reader/emulate based on PN53x chipset of NXP.
But the disadvantage of this chipset is , you can't emulate ISO14443-B
why is PN53x chipset ...
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1answer
184 views
How to design a microcontroller [closed]
After I made an advanced operating system my next crazy idea is to make a microcontroller.
I want to design it and then send it to a manufacturer to make the chip.
So where I will design it and where ...
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1answer
43 views
GDSII stream reading
GDSII is a photomask\artwork format for photolitography. I am having trouble resolving a particular line in the file.
For example, 'SRefs' means it refers to one of the structures and uses this ...
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2answers
566 views
Is VHDL for digital circuits only?
Both Wikipedia and other SO questions about VHDL vs Verilog mention digital when describing VHDL.
Can you use VHDL to design analog circuits?
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1answer
99 views
How does the IC design process work? [closed]
Particularly for highly complex, digital ICs. Is it bottom up or top down? In particular, for top-down design designs the actual logic gates?
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2answers
250 views
What is the structural difference between a high-drive and a low-drive cell?
I've come across IC's that are labeled high-drive and low drive. I know that a high-drive IC has a higher intrinsic propagation delay but isn't as steep as a low-drive IC in function of the load to ...
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5answers
1k views
Difference between a memory cell and a memory chip?
I have gotten very confused on the fundamentals of computer memory in regards to memory cells and chips. I have been reading Assembly Language Step By Step Programming with Linux by Jeff Duntemann and ...
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1answer
130 views
Voltage conversion +1V to -3V inside a new IC design
I am looking for a good integrated CMOS solution for creating -3V out of a 1V supply. The -3V are just used for biasing and hence do not load the supply.
This means that the solution should be switch ...
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2answers
2k views
What does the “side-band” and “in-band” mean in the context of digital circuit?
I read below content from the Intel On-chip System Fabric (IOSF) spec. AS I understand, the IOSF is a technology for chip reuse and interconnect.
The sideband message interface covers most ...
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0answers
226 views
Programming a Gate Array with a 3d Printer
I'm a software engineer, and so this question probably shows my total ignorance of this field...
I have been researching various options for manufacturing digital logic circuits in low volume. ASICs ...
3
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2answers
469 views
STM32 peripheral current consumption
I want to use a STM32F072 for a new product and saw table 35@page 65 in the datasheet.
This table lists the current consumption of several peripherals of the MCU.
I'm asking why relative simple ...
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4answers
153 views
Where to go with an idea for a chip? [closed]
I tinker with AVR, 6502 and z80 designs, just muck around really, nothing overly serious. But as a result I had a thought of an idea for a new chip.
Specifically a SoC built around a z80 core. But ...
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4answers
189 views
Is there an “additive manufacturing” method to make an ASIC?
Reading questions like this one "How much does it cost to have a custom ASIC made?", I was wondering if there's some sort of equivalent to additive manufacturing that would lower the cost to getting ...
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1answer
229 views
Most efficient circuit for 2048 Bit multiplication, and how to effectively render it
So this isn't for a hardware application, but I still think it will be extremely relevant to those that are chip designers/EE enthusiasts.
I'm attempting to do some analysis on multiplication viewed ...
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2answers
223 views
Chip Design Computer Generated Files for Fabrication Process
Could someone provide an overview of how the chip design files are used by the fabrication process? What I mean is once the design engineer(s) have completed the computer generated design blue print ...
3
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1answer
446 views
Power categories in ASIC design (Design Compiler)
I am currently working on the synthesis, with Synopsys' Design Compiler, of an AES encryption module.
In the power reports there are three power categories specified :
Switching Power
Internal Power
...
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2answers
110 views
how broad is the term “chipset”? [closed]
Can I use the term "chipset supplier" to refer generically to companies that provide packaged semiconductor chips?
Or, should "chipset" only be used to describe companies that manufacture a set of ...
4
votes
2answers
163 views
Kick-off Spread Spectrum Clocking
Need of SSC:
Spread spectrum clocking (SSC) is a special way to reduce the radiated emissions of digital clock signals. These levels or energy is radiated and therefore this is where a potential EMI ...
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1answer
65 views
Attempting to connect a simple memory chip to a computer
not too long ago a friend jokingly bought me this simple toy which basically consists of a "push-me button" that creates a laughter sound when pushed.
How the hardware looks
I pulled the speaker out ...
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1answer
406 views
Generate constant voltage sources from the power supply using MOSFET
Suppose if I have a Vdd of 1.4V and I want to generate 1.2V and 1V constant voltages even when there are slight changes in the load values, is there any possible way of achieving this?
Well I tried ...
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1answer
398 views
What kinds of parallel RAM are there?
I have basically no experience in electrical engineering or hardware design, but as an experienced software engineer, I recently took an interest in designing my own CPU. I followed the instructions/...
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1answer
111 views
Design to fit components in small space
I have to design the connections between different electrical components inside a wireless equipment. The "traditional" way to connect each one with the others is the PCB, but the particular shape of ...
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3answers
986 views
DIL Chip information required
I have a "Delay Timer Switch, with delay adjustable from 0 to 10 seconds". It operates from 12V.
Can anybody tell me that what is this part in this PCB?
I guess it is DIL chip (I am a beginner and ...
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2answers
1k views
How is VHDL used?
I'm new to hobby electronics/robotics and am trying to understand the use case for VHDL. The syntax is easy enough to understand, but I'm not seeing the "forest through the trees" on a few items.
For ...
5
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2answers
542 views
Effective Address calculation time on 8086/8088
I've started designing an implementation of an 8088 from scratch with the goal of being cycle-exact. I can understand the reasoning behind the number of clock cycles for most instructions, however I ...
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1answer
2k views
How can I make a 1K X 16 ROM chip with eight 256 X 8 ROM chips with an enable input and a decoder?
I came across this, which I'm guessing is correct, but I do not understand the shortcuts made here. What are the 8's with slashes through them? Do those represent 8 inputs and 8 outputs? And can ...
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2answers
647 views
Bit Slice Checker
I'm attempting to use bit-slice design, to implement a circuit which checks if an n-bit binary number A has an even number of 1's in its binary representation. I've decided that the circuit should ...
2
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1answer
754 views
Verilog, register values
For learning purposes, I am trying to implement a very simple processor in verilog. The idea is that every clock cycle the machine either fetches the next 4 instructions from memory (each instruction ...
5
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4answers
2k views
Why do microcontrollers have so many functionalities at once?
Being fairly new in the field of electronics, and being a computer scientist, it strikes me as a bit odd that almost every single microcontroller that I've come across thus far is fitted with:
...
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1answer
102 views
How are processors tested before going to production?
No matter how much experience an engineer has, or how many engineer works on the design of a processor or a microcontroller, we are human at the end, and it is possible to make mistakes. Before ...
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3answers
248 views
Instructions on how to build electronic devices [duplicate]
I have got plenty of books in the theory of electronic devices, but I wish to build these transistors (BJT, MOSFETS, etc) and diodes by myself.
Which books are there in offer to learn how to do this?
5
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1answer
335 views
How is EMI avoided inside of an IC?
I was re-watching this video about how CPUs are made and at the time of the video the link points to, I thought "Isn't there some EMI problems with all those transistor signals flying all over the ...
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3answers
135 views
Are there examples of chips where comparing 2 against zero would be slower than comparing 1 against zero?
This question on StackOverflow goes like this which is faster - while(1) or while(2)? Asking which of two infinite loops is ...
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1answer
886 views
How do you constrain input delay for a multidimenionsal input vector?
I am defining SDC input constraints for synthesis of a small module that is part of a larger ASIC design. I plan to run the module through synthesis using Synopsys tools. A few of the inputs to this ...
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2answers
3k views
Why we gradually increase size of inverters in buffer design?
When trying to drive a high capacitive load why do we gradually increase size of inverters in buffer design. Why not give the output of a circuit to one large inverter?
