VLSI Design Laboratory Wiki Home Page







VLSI Design Laboratory
INFN, Sezione di Torino
Università degli Studi di Torino, Dipartimento di Fisica
via Pietro Giuria 1
10125, Torino, Italy
Phone: +39.011.670.7380
Fax: +39.011.669.9579
E-mail: vlsi-users@NOSPAMto.infn.it



Welcome to the VLSI Design Laboratory Wiki home page!



The VLSI Design Laboratory is part of the Electronics Service of the Turin Section of INFN. It provides analog, digital, mixed-mode and radiation tolerant design capabilities devoted to the development of full-custom Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), meeting microeletronics requests made by different physics research groups at the University of Turin.
The design flow is carried out with extensive use of computer-aided design (CAD) techniques. In particular, the VLSI lab offers a large collection of professional electronic design automation (EDA) softwares licensed by INFN for analog, mixed-mode and digital IC design. These tools are commercial solutions and de-facto industry standards.

VLSI lab Wiki pages would become the primary source of documentation about design activities and provide a simple environment for collecting whatever can make the daily work a bit easier.

If you are a new student, please read carefully Wiki pages dedicated to obtaining accounts and getting started with the VLSI lab computing environment !

Projects and research activities

The VLSI lab is currently involved in several design projects. Full-custom analog and mixed-mode design activities are focused on the development of fast, low-noise and low-power radiation tolerant integrated front-end electronics for pixel and silicon strip detectors, which are used for particle tracking, timing and energy measurements. Digital design activities range from the concept of the overall control logic for the analog part to high-level digital signal processing, data acquisition and fast and high-rate off-chip data transmission.

For some years now, special attention is devoted to the design of hybrid pixel and double-sided microstrip detector readout chips for the Micro Vertex Detector (MVD) of the PANDA (antiProton ANnihilation at DArmstadt) experiment at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research (Germany). In this project the Turin Section of INFN holds the overall R&D management and coordination.
Since 2011 the VLSI lab has been also involved in both medium (2016-2017) and long-term (2020-2022) upgrade projects of the ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) detectors at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Furtheromore, opportunities offered by recent breakthroughs in the development of microelectronics for precise time and energy measurements has been exploited in designing the front-end electronics for medical applications in positron emission tomography (PET) and for a third party commercial project supported by EU funding.

Wiki pages of current VLSI activities can be accessed here. They are meant to provide public documentation and links as well as private users support. Descriptions of past projects and designs which have been completed in the last decades can be found in Old projects pages instead.

See also http://personalpages.to.infn.it/~mazza/projects.html

Details about master theses opportunities can be found here.

Private area

To read VLSI protected pages, you must first obtain a VLSI Wiki account.

You can access the VLSI protected area here. Left click on Entra at the top-right of the home page and authenticate yourself using your Wiki credentials.

Never put confidential and restricted information on Wiki public pages !

Wiki resources

INFN resources

External resources




Wiki creator: Luca Pacher
Last update: Luca Pacher - Jan 29, 2015