Digital Design Flow Techniques and Circuit Design for Thin-Film Transistors

Abstract: Thin-Film Transistor (TFT) technology refers to process and manufacture transistors, circuits, Integrated circuits (ICs) using thin-film organic or metal-oxide semiconductors on different substrates, such as flexible plastic foils and rigid glass substrates. TFT technology is attractive and used for applications requiring flexible, ultrathin ICs to enable seamless integration into devices. TFT technology shows great potential to be an enabling technology for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. TFT is currently used and a dominant technology for switching circuits in flatpanel displays and are the main candidates for IoT applications in the near future because of its flexible structure, low cost. It is possible to design different kinds of Application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) with flexible TFTs. Logic gates are considered as the basic building blocks of a digital circuit. An Integrated circuit (IC) is built from a standard cell library that consists of simple and complex logic gates. In this thesis, using TFTs, a variety of standard cell libraries are built using different logic styles. The designed standard cell libraries are compared with respect to parameters like performance, power and area. A digital ASIC design flow is a crucial and important for any System on Chip (SoC) implementation. The designed libraries are prepared for digital design flow such as synthesis, place and route and sign-off analysis to utilize the benefits of existing automated Electronic design automation (EDA) tools. This research was carried out at Imec. TFT technology transistors were used to design the circuits, standard cells and ICs presented in the thesis.