Reorder "Device Details" Sections

[thasti]

From a designer's point of view, I found the order in which devices are listed in the "Design Rules" -> "Device Details" section extremely confusing.

With this MR I propose to re-order them in a more intiuitive way: Starting with the core (1.8 V) MOS devices, followed by high voltage/ESD variants, then bipolars, special cells and finally passives. I also found it more appropriate to list the MOS varactors close to the core active devices, this is where they are typically listed in PDK documentation in my experience.

[thasti]

Here's the resulting order of devices rendered in the documentation:

[thasti]

I added a few more consistency fixes, now the ToC is a lot more digestible.

[thasti]

Sure, an overview page with an index of devices (by category, by human-readable name, by primitive name) would be nicer than just this table of contents as a means to find out what exists. Not so sure what "alphabetical order" would really mean here. The sections were previously sorted alphabetically by the name of the folder in documentation/device-details/, which neither consistently corresponds to the name of the primitive/models (cf. special_sram vs special_nfet_pass/latch) nor to the actual title used for the section (cf. res_generic vs. Generic resistors, ). That's in part where my confusion came from: it wasn't obvious what the list was sorted by, looking at the headings.

A few static tables in a "device index"/"device reference" section with links into the corresponding sections would be a good first step, I imagine.

On a different note: I actually found it quite confusing that these "Device Details" are listed in the "Design Rules" section, and not as their own top-level section. None of the devices really have any "design rules" listed (I would have expected to find things like limits/bins for W/L, minimum/maximum number of fingers for which the models are valid, etc). As it is, it gives me more of a "electrical specifications" type vibe. Would you be open to moving it out of there?

[mithro]

Sure, an overview page with an index of devices (by category, by human-readable name, by primitive name) would be nicer than just this table of contents as a means to find out what exists. Not so sure what "alphabetical order" would really mean here. The sections were previously sorted alphabetically by the name of the folder in documentation/device-details/, which neither consistently corresponds to the name of the primitive/models (cf. special_sram vs special_nfet_pass/latch) nor to the actual title used for the section (cf. res_generic vs. Generic resistors, ). That's in part where my confusion came from: it wasn't obvious what the list was sorted by, looking at the headings.

A few static tables in a "device index"/"device reference" section with links into the corresponding sections would be a good first step, I imagine.

On a different note: I actually found it quite confusing that these "Device Details" are listed in the "Design Rules" section, and not as their own top-level section. None of the devices really have any "design rules" listed (I would have expected to find things like limits/bins for W/L, minimum/maximum number of fingers for which the models are valid, etc). As it is, it gives me more of a "electrical specifications" type vibe. Would you be open to moving it out of there?

Sorry about the slow response, I was busy been attending ICCAD22.

I agree with pretty much all your points here!

I think moving the page makes sense but we should make sure to set up a redirect from the old location to the new location.

Do you think it makes sense to split the devices into their own pages? Specially if we start expanding them with more details? I think it would be great to have the design rules you specified available here as well.

There has recently been a lot of work to try and do simulations of these devices to show the models match the ETest data found in these pages. That could also be a candidate for

So the question is what next steps make the most sense? I think maybe the following;

• [ ] Merge this pull request?
• [ ] A few static tables in a "device index"/"device reference" section with links into the corresponding sections?
• [ ] Move the page location to somewhere better and set up redirects?

What do you think?

[thasti]

Fully agree. If you are happy with the state of the MR for the moment, I'd be OK to merge and may then try to look at those tables.

I think separate pages per device would make sense as soon as they have more info added to them, navigation can become a bit unwieldy if everything is on one loong page with many images to load etc.