VLSI Design—Trends, Practices and Evolution

Abstract

With the decreasing feature sizes and increasing chip areas, silicon microchips have been broadly doubling their component counts per chip every two years. This relentless exponential growth in the component counts has maintained its trend through out the eighties also, leaving the VLSI design methods struggling to cope as the actual component counts possible on chips have reached the figure of one million towards the close of the decade. This paper broadly reviews the VLSI design scenario as it evolved during the eighties-globally, in India and at the author's organisation.

Indexing terms:

• MOS VLSI technology
• Computer Aided Design tools