M.Tech. VLSI Design & CAD:Hardware – Software Co-design

First Semester I

Physics of Semiconductor Devices
IC Fabrication Technology
Digital VLSI Design
CAD Systems Environment
Research Methodology


Second Semester

Analog IC Design
Hardware Description Languages
Embedded Systems


Third Semester

Seminar
Thesis starts

Fourth Semester

Thesis


Hardware – Software Co-design

Programming languages for embedded systems: desirable characteristics of programming languages for embedded systems, low-level versus high-level languages, main language implementation issues: control, typing, exception handling, modularity and multi-threading. Major programming languages for embedded systems: Assembly, C/C++, Ada, Java and Esterel.

Timing characteristics of embedded systems: hard, soft and firm systems; fail-safe and fail-operational systems. Guaranteed-response, best-effort, event and time-triggered systems. Timing constraints in embedded systems.

Performance analysis of embedded systems: software timing characterization and analysis methods.

Runtime and Operating systems: real-time and non-real time applications. Task assignment and scheduling: characteristics of tasks, task assignment and multi-tasking. Static and dynamic scheduling under constraints.

Memory management and synchronization for embedded software: mutual exclusion, deadlock, starvation and lockouts; priority assignment, inversion; event flags and signals.

Software optimization techniques under constraints: size, performance, embeddability metrics.

Compilation techniques for embedded software: code generation, retargetability, code optimization.

Examples of embedded and real-time software systems. Real time databases: transaction handling and consistency management.