This book teaches basic and advanced concepts, new methodologies and recent developments in VLSI technology with a focus on low power design. It provides insight on how to use Tanner Spice, Cadence tools, Xilinx tools, VHDL programming and Synopsis to design simple and complex circuits using latest state-of-the art technologies. Emphasis is placed on fundamental transistor circuit-level design concepts.

The shrinking of device dimension leads to reduction of gate oxide thickness. As a result of this the undesirable hot electron effect and the gate tunneling current is increased. In order to overcome this drawback high-k materials are used instead of silicon dioxide as the insulating material underneath the gate. High-k dielectrics are used in semiconductor manufacturing processes where they are usually used to replace a silicon dioxide gate dielectric.Among various high-k materials, Hafnium oxide (HfO2), Tantalum pent oxide (Ta2O5) these materials appear to be the candidates for replacing silicon oxide. These high-k dielectrics exhibit a trend of decreasing barrier height with increasing dielectric constant.The high-k materials with far higher permittivity create same gate capacitance for thicker dielectric. In this book the main focus has been on the modeling and the influence of depletion layers around the source and the drain regions on the sub threshold surface potential of a short-channel DMG MOS transistor with a uniformly-doped channel.

A major issue of concern in the study of digital communication is to provide a form of secure and interference free communication system in a hostile environment. This requirement is catered by a class of signaling techniques known as SPREAD SPECTRUM MODULATION. In this technique the transmitted signal spectrum is spread over a frequency range much greater than the message bandwidth . The spectrum is accomplished before the transmission through the use of code that is independent of data sequence. The same code is used in the receiver (operating synchronously with the transmitter) to de-spread the received signal so that the original message is recovered.