Welcome to the home page of Kansas State University's Very Large-Scale Integration research and development. Over the past several years, K-State has established itself as a leader in the ever expanding (shrinking? :-) realm of microelectronics. Many of our current projects and classes are described below. Considerable work and teaching in these areas was been accomplished by Dr. William Kuhn, Dr. Andrew Rys and many K-State students.
The integrated circuits designed at Kansas
State are fabricated through MOSIS,
a low-cost prototyping and small-volume production service for VLSI circuit
development.
EDA Tools
As levels of integration increase, and size & cost of devices decrease, it has become necessary to implement complete RF components on silicon. Unfortunately, the understanding and modeling of passive components is still incomplete. Shobak recently earned his masters degrees by producing a Spice modeling program for simulating on-chip spiral inductors and transformers.
Click here for access to an FREE alpha-test Linux executable and preliminary documentation.
K-State's EECE 690/890 (Digital Radio Microelectronics Design) is an experimental course designed to teach RF integrated circuit design concepts while involving students in on-going research activities within our research group. Class activities included traditional lectures, homework and a midterm exam during the first half of the semester, followed by a design project during the second half. Since their projects are fairly complex, this class is ongoing with each semester's class designing various components. The eventual product will be a complete Bluetooth-compatible transceiver-on-a-chip.
The 7 students enrolled in the class of Spring 2001 developed a fully integrated Bluetooth transmitter, which will be fabricated and tested. Their achievements can be found here.
Previously, in the Spring 2000 semester, 11 students completed the design
for a companion to the Bluetooth receiver. This chip has been fabricated
and is currently in testing. Details of the prior year's receiver
design can be found here.
This site was
developed as part of an introductory course in VLSI design conducted at
Kansas State University in the Fall 1999 Semester. The course project
involved a team-oriented design of a substantial mixed-signal chip,
the KSU696 Monolithic Stereo FM Transmitter IC.
Addresistor - Executing this program on a Spice file will add a 100 giga-ohm resistance to ground on each node. This eliminated the "singular matrix" error that can when simulating a Spice netlist. Note - user must add the line ".include addresistor.spice" into their file. Copyright 2001 Sam Johnson.
MagicBmp - Takes a Windows bitmap file and creates a script file for MAGIC. Performs basic run-length compression (combines adjacent pixels in a scan line into a single rectangle. Contributed by Ben Voigt.