Displaying posts in the categoryPhysical Design
Physical Design articles
Process Technology
For more than fifty years, power and signals have shared the same side of the chip. Backside power delivery ends that. Power comes up through the back of a thinned wafer, and the front metal stack is left mostly to signals. Intel builds this into 18A as PowerVia, and TSMC plans it for A16 as Super Power Rail. The headline benefit is easy to state: less voltage drop and more room for routing. The harder question for a design team is what change…
by
Murugavel Ganesan
November 05, 2026
Technology
A PDK (Process Design Kit) is the package of models, rules, libraries and verification decks that a foundry supplies for one manufacturing process, so that chip designers can simulate, lay out and check a design before it is built. It is the foundry's process described in a form that EDA tools can read. Every chip that reaches silicon, from a smartphone processor to a power converter, was designed against a PDK, which is why it is often call…
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Murugavel Ganesan
September 16, 2025
Verification
A chip design house does not run the fab, but it controls most of what decides whether a chip survives tape-out, production and the field: how thoroughly the RTL is verified before tape-out, how manufacturable the layout is, how carefully third-party IP is qualified, and whether timing and behaviour are signed off across every process, voltage and temperature corner. Get those four right and most re-spins, yield losses and field failures are pre…
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Murugavel Ganesan
May 09, 2025
Top 50
Physical design interviews test whether you can take a synthesised netlist to a clean, sign-off ready layout: floorplanning, power planning, placement, clock tree synthesis, routing, timing closure and physical verification. The 50 questions below are the ones that come up most often, from basic concepts to tape-out, each with a short model answer. Use them to check your own answers, then expect the interviewer to push for numbers, trade-offs an…
by
Murugavel Ganesan
January 03, 2025
Top 50
VLSI interviews test whether you understand the whole path from RTL to silicon: logic design, timing, power, physical design, signal integrity, test and manufacturing. The 50 questions below are the ones that come up most often for VLSI design roles, each with a short model answer you can build on. Interviewers rarely stop at the definition, so for each topic expect a follow-up on trade-offs, numbers or a problem you solved on a real project. …
by
Murugavel Ganesan
January 03, 2025
Tutorials
An inverter outputs the logical complement of its input; a buffer outputs the same logic value, and in CMOS it is normally built as two inverters in series. For the same output drive, an inverter is smaller and faster because it has one stage instead of two, while a buffer keeps polarity, which makes it the easy drop-in choice for repeaters, fanout splitting and hold fixing. In timing closure both are used to repair long wires, high fanout and b…
by
Murugavel Ganesan
November 21, 2023
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