Resources

• Principles of CMOS VLSI Design, 2nd Edition, by Neil Weste and Kamran Eshragian, is a widely-used text in both undergraduate and graduate electrical engineering curricula. It provides an excellent introduction to modern CMOS IC design and includes several case studies and hundreds of references to the technical literature.
• SPICE: A Guide to Circuit Simulation using PSpice, by Paul Tuinenga, is a very good introduction applicable to all variants of SPICE including 3f4. It uses a tutorial approach to demonstrate many different types of simulations and includes a summary of SPICE commands and circuit elements.
• Circuits, Interconnections, and Packaging for VLSI, by H. B. Bakoglu, addresses many important problems in IC design. It does an excellent job of balancing level of detail against breadth of topics while maintaining a high level of readability. This is an invaluable general reference for anyone interested in the field.
• The previously-mentioned WWW page at http://www.research.digital.com/wrl/projects/magic/magic.html is maintained by Bob Mayo of DEC's Western Research Laboratory. It contains links to the latest Magic sources, as well as to the Magic hypermail archive, where you can discuss Magic with other users. There are also links to various on-line VLSI resources.
• The MOSIS WWW page at http://www.isi.edu/mosis/ includes links to their latest tech files, performance data from fabrication runs, examples of projects designed using Magic and subsequently fabricated by MOSIS, and lots of other useful information.
• The IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, is where the wizards publish details about the latest advances in IC design. Be warned, this journal is aimed at experienced circuit designers—it's not light reading. You might have to visit your local university library to find it.

The following are other useful on-line VLSI (very large scale integration) resources; there are undoubtedly many others.

• The USENET newsgroup comp.lsi.cad (remember, read the FAQ before posting)
• http://www.mrc.uidaho.edu/vlsi/vlsi.html
• http://www-mtl.mit.edu/semisubway.html