Introduction to CMOS VLSI Design

This is where you stop treating transistors as ideal switches and start designing actual silicon: how MOSFETs really behave, how to size them for speed and power, and how a schematic turns into a layout that a foundry can fabricate. Most of the work happens in Cadence — you'll analyze CMOS gates with hand calculations, then build and verify combinational blocks (logic, adders) through homeworks and a substantial project that takes a circuit from schematic to DRC-clean layout. It bridges the device physics you saw earlier with the digital systems courses that assume gates "just work," and it's the gateway to chip-design electives and any serious hardware role.