Essential Books, Courses & Resources

Foundational Books

• Weste & Harris - CMOS VLSI Design (the bible)
• Rabaey et al. - Digital Integrated Circuits
• Patterson & Hennessy - Computer Organization & Design
• Bhatnagar - Advanced ASIC Chip Synthesis (DC-specific)
• Elmore - RC delay modeling papers

Online Resources

• efabless.com - Free chip tapeout with Sky130
• openroad.tools - Open-source RTL-to-GDS
• vlsiuniverse.com - VLSI interview prep
• Synopsys SolvNetPlus - Official DC/PT docs
• Cadence Training - Innovus/Genus tutorials
• IEEE Xplore - DAC, ICCAD, CICC papers

Courses & Projects

• MIT 6.004 - Computation Structures (free)
• Coursera: HDL & FPGA - Entry RTL practice
• Build a RISC-V CPU in Verilog, synthesize it
• Tape-out on Sky130 via efabless chipIgnite
• Contribute to OpenROAD - visible open-source work
• ICCAD Contests - Register for student competitions