Logical Effort: Designing Fast CMOS Circuits

Designers of high-speed integrated circuits face a bewildering array of choices and too often spend frustrating days tweaking gates to meet speed targets. Logical Effort: Designing Fast CMOS Circuits makes high speed design easier and more methodical, providing a simple and broadly applicable method for estimating the delay resulting from factors such as topology, capacitance, and gate sizes.

The brainchild of circuit and computer graphics pioneers Ivan Sutherland and Bob Sproull, "logical effort" will change the way you approach design challenges. This book begins by equipping you with a sound understanding of the method's essential procedures and concepts-so you can start using it immediately. Later chapters explore the theory and finer points of the method and detail its specialized applications.

• Explains the method and how to apply it in two practically focused chapters.
• Improves circuit design intuition by teaching simple ways to discern the consequences of topology and gate size decisions.
• Offers easy ways to choose the fastest circuit from among an array of potential circuit designs.
• Reduces the time spent on tweaking and simulations-so you can rapidly settle on a good design.
• Offers in-depth coverage of specialized areas of application for logical effort: skewed or unbalanced gates, other circuit families (including pseudo-NMOS and domino), wide structures such as decoders, and irregularly forking circuits.
• Presents a complete derivation of the method-so you see how and why it works.

Ivan E. Sutherland, a vice president and fellow at Sun Microsystems, received the Turing Award and the Von Neumann Medal for his pioneering contributions in the fields of computer graphics and microelectronic design.

Robert F. Sproull is an internationally noted expert on the design of graphics hardware and software. He too is a vice president and fellow at Sun.

David Harris is the Harvey S. Mudd Professor of Engineering Design at Harvey Mudd College. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University and his M.Eng. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. Before attending Stanford, he worked at Intel as a logic and circuit designer on the Itanium and Pentium II processors. Since then, he has consulted at Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Broadcom, and other design companies. David holds more than a dozen patents and is the author of three other textbooks on chip design, as well as many Southern California hiking guidebooks. When he is not working, he enjoys hiking, flying, and making things with his three sons.