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Digital integrated circuits
Rabaey J., Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1996. Type: Book (9780131786097)
Date Reviewed: Dec 1 1996

Rabaey has written a terrific text on digital integrated circuits. It is written in an easygoing style and is not pedantic, yet it conveys a tremendous amount of information. It is suitable for three purposes: an advanced undergraduate college digital circuits course; a graduate CIS or electrical engineering course on the same topic; or a tutorial to bring the practicing electrical engineer up to date on the latest design techniques. The author provides a tree that indicates the sequence of chapters that accomplish each task.

Generally, this type of text is oriented to a top-down approach; some other texts take the bottom-up approach, building with small circuit atoms to create modules of larger and larger size, and eventually arriving at the circuit board  design.  The author examines both approaches and incorporates them into the text. Other important features of the book include extensive examples with analysis; excellent illustrations; and exhaustive references. According to the author’s tree, the three courses of study are an introduction--chapters 1 and 2; core information--chapters 3, 4, 6, and 11; and advanced and new areas in the field--chapters 5, 7, 8, 9, and10.

The first chapter, the introduction, is devoted to the history of integrated circuit design. The second chapter, on devices, considers diodes, MOSFET transistors, and bipolar devices.

The core material begins with chapter 3, on the inverter, which contains definitions and examines the physical and electrical properties of the materials. Chapter 4 examines the details of the static CMOS inverter and the bipolar ECL inverter. Chapter 6 considers how to design combinatorial logic gates using CMOS and sequential logic circuits. Chapter 11 details design methodologies, including analysis and simulation, verification, implementation approaches, design synthesis, and the validation and testing of manufactured circuits.

Chapter 5 is about very high performance digital circuits: bipolar gates, the BiCMOS approach, digital gallium arsenide design, and low-temperature digital circuits. Chapter 7 considers how to design arithmetic building blocks--adders, multipliers, shifters, and other such units-- and combine them meaningfully. Coping with parasitics is covered in chapter 8, including packaging designs. Timing issues in digital circuits are the topic of chapter 9, which presents clocks, self-timed circuits, synchronism, and arbiters. Chapter 10 covers memory: SRAM, DRAM, ROM, volatility, peripheral circuitry, reliability, and manufacturing yield.

Most chapters end with a projection of future developments, a summary of the issues covered, a list of pertinent references, and a set of exercises and design problems. Many chapters have one or more appendices, each with its own set of references and problems. There are solutions to a few of the problems in the back of the book.

What particularly caught my fancy, as a modern art lover, is the cover, containing a color reproduction of a painting by Piet Mondrian. (He is given no credit, but “PM” is visible in the picture’s corner.) The blocks of color in the painting are comparable to the layers on the printed circuit board. This theme, areas of shaded blocks, is carried through the book design and is used for headings of chapters and appendices. A number of color plates at the end of chapter 1 show how colored blocks can represent layers of the printed circuit board. This work was well thought out.

Reviewer:  Ivan Flores Review #: CR120115 (9612-0944)
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