When the first planar integrated circuit was fabricated in 1961, combining 2 transistors on a common substrate, it was hardly imaginable that within little over 40 years it would be possible to integrate a billion transistors on a single chip. This dramatic evolution in semiconductor fabrication technology has followed Moor’s law, who predicted this exponential growth as soon as 1965. This exponential growth is still expected to continue, providing new application opportunities. However, the design of these new applications provides new challenges to the development of such systems on chip. Problems, created due to feature sizes below 100nm, design complexity, growing software content in integrated circuits, power consumption, on-chip communications and interconnects, radio frequencies as well as high resolution analogue interfaces in ‘noisy’ digital environment, just to name a few, need to be solved in always shorter time to market. For all this, industry needs design engineers who master both the complexity of integrated systems and have a broad understanding in technology and devices.

The international graduate curriculum Integrated Systems and Circuits Design was developed in a cooperation of academic and industry experts and will address all challenges of the design of integrated systems and circuis.

The objective is to generate special skills in the following three areas:

System solutions

System and VLSI architectures

Embedded systems

SoC – system on chip

SiP – system in package

Modeling

Integration

Fabrication technology

Analog and digital VDSM-circuit design

Sensors and power electronics

Design methodology

Use of modern CAD tools

Modeling and verification

HDLs – hardware description languages

In these working areas chip designers often concentrate on the development of analog or digital components, which are also frequently used in mixed-signal integrated circuits. While most designers worldwide specialize on the design of purely digital components, Austrian microelectronic companies employ many experts for analog and mixed-signal integrated circuit design. 

Therefore the ISCD curriculum offers 2 semesters of mandatory courses and allows specialization in the more analog or digitally dominated domain through elective courses in semester 3 and a thesis work which is accompanied by seminars with presentations and technical discussions, in semester 4.