Summary

Reference

Dr. Cavallaro

Division of Work by Group Members

We all worked together to develop the design and functionality for CHIPMONC. We discussed instruction format, types of instructions to execute, and the basic ideas of how to implement the circuit. After the initial brainstorming and design, we split up the segments to work on more detailed gate-level design and magic layout:
Deborah--PLA, some Registers
Jill--ALU
Rebecca--Memory

Comments and Suggestions on CAD Tool

Overall, we were very happy with the CAD tools and had few frustrations. Magic is very simple and offers little in the way of advanced options, but it is consistent and allowed us to learn a great deal while designing and laying out our chip. Though we had some difficulties with it, we feel that Magic is reasonably ok. In addition, we had no specific complaints with irsim or spice, although it would have been nice to have a little more instruction in spice before using it.

Our biggest problems occurred as a result of incompatibilities between the CAD tools and the real world. It was often frustrating when Magic would not recognize joined n-wells or would display unintelligible errors, but these occurrances were rare. More instruction in spice would have been very useful. We were only able to cut and paste to create new experiment files, since we were not familiar with all of the syntax.

This is a Group Project for Elec422.
Members: Rebecca Ma | Jill Nelson | Deborah Watt

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