The IC design aids and equipment available at Texas A&M are continually updated. Each year since 1980 two multiproject chips have been designed which were fabricated by Texas Instruments. Individual project chips are fabricated through the MOSIS (funded by the National Science Foundation) program. Computational equipment available in the Electrical Engineering Department includes two SUN 10,000/SPARCS servers. Larger computer systems on campus are available over the local ETHERNET. A network of SUN workstations are available. Software toolsets are available for VLSI design work. These CAD tools include the UWNW package, Cadence Design Systems, most of the Berkeley VLSI CAD tools along with numerous programs obtained from various sources and/or written internally.

The following is a partial listing of software available on the VLSI CAD facilities

Analog Workbench Tool Set
HSPICE -circuit simulator
MAGIC -a layout editor
SCA -Single-layer Critical Area Extractor
LASER -a viewer of critical areas
ALWAYS -a wafer yield editor
OCTTOOLS
Spectre 1a1 -a frequency-domain simulation for nonlinear circuits (formerly Harmonica)
SPICE3E -a general-purpose circuit simulator with several built-in semiconductor device models.
FIESTA II -a software package for filter design including approximation and synthesis
CADENCE -a software package for IC design, layout and simulation
SPW -a software package for Communications design.

 

Diagram of our Computational Facilities

1 Sun Enterprise 450 server with 1GB RAM, 16GB disk space and 2-300MHz processors
4 SUN SPARC 20’s servers with 1GB internal disk space
4 Servers configured with 2 processors (60MHz) and 128MB or RAM and the remaining server is configured with 1 processor and 64MB of RAM
1 SUN SPARC LX with 1GB disk space
1 SUN SPARC IPC
(10) LINUX/DOS Pentium 400 MHz PC
30 LINUX/DOS K6 233 MHz PC’s with 17" color monitors
1 Silicon Graphics Indigo II workstation with 2GB disk space
1 Galileo (SGI) video tool
1 SUN SPARC 2 with 1GB disk space
1 TI deskjet color printer
2 External CD ROM drives
1 Phaser 220e Tektronix color printer
2 External tape drivers
1 HP7229C E Size 8 color graphics plotter