Top products from r/chipdesign

I don't know where you are coming from knowledge-wise. I can only assume by reading between the lines.

First make sure you know all the analog circuit design and analysis techniques of discrete power circuits. For example, how you'd build a discrete transistor linear regulator, or switching regulator or reference.

This is obligatory because everything in PMIC are direct 1-to-1 to discrete circuits with the IC part mostly being just a "flourish" (a luxury or showing off) AND often you can't do everything on-chip anyway and you'll usually need an external device or circuitry.

How you meet spec starts with discrete design - nothing is different and most examples in the discrete space are easier to understand and practice. So for this books like Pressman or similar are good.

Related to this is basic analog circuit design and device modeling. For example band-gap references are defined by semiconductor device physics and the impact of basic analog circuit effects. I don't know if you already know about this stuff but often, as the band gap video shows, device physics and device model subtleties enter deeply into analog IC circuit design. Books like Gray-Meyer, Razavi, Sedra-Smith, etc.

Also watch ALL videos by Bob Pease and Jim Williams. These guys were involved in designing most of the PMICs made and still sold by National Semiconductor and Linear Technology.

Plus you should be pouring over EVERY SINGLE app note and product data sheet of every power product made by: Analog Devices, Texas Instruments, Linear Technologies, and other smaller players. These are where the "state of the art" resides and it's a gold mine.

Why all this legacy stuff? Because if you are going to design any PMICs, it must be delivery something economically more useful than all of these and because most of the design techniques and circuit topologies are already defined and well-documented in these products and their literature. Your designs are competing with these parts.

Next realize that you'll probably need to know and design in both bipolar and CMOS or biCMOS because of the power levels involved. It's also very common to "run out of power handling" on-chip and have to resort to external discrete of a different technology (e.g. CMOS/bipolar power chip but bipolar/power MOS/GaN/etc. external transistors). In analog, you see every process technology and device type which is really cool but not everyone finds it as exciting as I do.

There are some "point technology" books such as Analog IC Design with Low Dropout Regulators. These are a "google away".

I would not count on finding books at this level however: this brings up what it means to attain "leading edge knowledge" which PMICs tend to be:

• Books are knowledge of (today - 5 years) - it takes too much time and effort for these to ever be current so the never are
  
• Commercial publications and social interaction are knowledge of (today ± < 5 years) - the rubber meets the road in the commercial sphere now
  
• Academic Journals are knowledge of (today + 5 years) - the purpose of academia is blue sky discovery
  
  Competing on the leading edge as an analog IC designer mostly means you are operating in the latter two knowledge spheres.
  
  Another issue is books at this level is they tend to be very one-dimension and narrow in terms of being "this was my PhD theses so I'm making it into a book" or "this is my product design; there are many product designs; but this product design is mine" but completely missing out on the actual N-dimensional reality of that particular subclass of circuits. Usually they don't give overarching insights or much about the variety of other designs that can work for exactly the same purpose but with specific trade-offs. In design, it's the deeper patterns that are most useful but seldom to be found.
  
  This is actually not unusual in analog design generally and analog IC design specifically. You have to be holistic and read everything and then triangulate to what you think is good design. I think a lot of this is because most engineers have poor writing skills and working engineers "who know" have too many technical/professional distractions to write good books but that's just my opinion.

> Need book/paper

BTW I seem to recall the general transition from NMOS to CMOS was somewhere in the 1978 to 1982 era or thereabouts.

The bible back then was "Introduction to VLSI Systems" by Carver Mead and Lynn Conway, a brilliant and pioneering book by brilliant authors.

It championed use of design rules and design rule checkers rather than the prior custom of hand-designing every gate. This was essential for increasing the number of gates per chip, but met with a lot of resistance from traditionalists.

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-VLSI-Systems-Carver-Mead/dp/0201043580/

If you go ahead and strip off the metal layer, I'd recommend joining up with a chemist to do that step. Fume hoods are essential, not optional, and it's easy to make extraordinarily dangerous newbie mistakes in handling things like strong acids.

It also may be necessary to go through multiple chips while fine tuning the process.

Also I wonder if someone may have already done the reverse engineering work for you. Seems worth googling extra hard to double-check.

A good reference for things like this
https://www.amazon.com/Analog-Circuit-Design-Personalities-Engineers/dp/0750696400

Digital Integrated Circuits: http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Integrated-Circuits-2nd-Rabaey/dp/0130909963

i'm guess you mean this RF book.