State of the Art in Circuit Design

The technologies that have been developed to address large-area and low-cost applications have been developed very recently and still pose severe limitations to the complexity achievable by integrated circuits. The transistor performance is limited and the process variations still represent a concrete issue with respect to circuit yield. In this chapter, the state of the art of large-area technologies is described, highlighting the main differences with respect to the most common standard silicon technologies. An overview is provided on the effort spent to build up a design flow platform easily configurable to address different and future technologies. The chapter concludes summarizing the state of the art in circuit design, which actually demonstrates all the difficulties that are experienced in this field when exploiting these technologies.