ABSTRACT
Modeling and simulation have always been used in microelectronics to study the behavior of MOS devices and very-large-scale-integration (VLSI) circuits, which have become the dominant technology in the semiconductors industry. Today, due to the reduction of metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) transistor dimensions, VLSI circuits commonly contain several billions of transistors with gate lengths down to 22 nm. The design of such circuit architectures is impossible without the assistance of simulation tools to predict the circuit operation before its manufacturing (Arora 2007). Computer-aided design (CAD) systems are thus essential tools for circuit design and verification operations.
