VLSI TECHNOLOGY

Invention of the first IC (Integrated Circuit) in the form of a Flip Flop by Jack Kilby in 1958, our ability to pack more and more transistors onto a single chip has doubled roughly every 18 months, in accordance with the Moore’s Law. Such exponential development had never been seen in any other field and it still continues to be a major area of research work.

By mid eighties, the transistor count on a single chip had already exceeded 1000 and hence came the age of Very Large Scale Integration or VLSI is the process of creating an integrated circuit (IC) by combining thousands of transistors into a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when complex semiconductor and communication technologies were being developed.Though many improvements have been made and the transistor count is still rising, further names of generations like ULSI are generally avoided. It was during this time when TTL lost the battle to MOS family owing to the same problems that had pushed vacuum tubes into negligence, power dissipation and the limit it imposed on the number of gates that could be placed on a single die.

The second age of Integrated Circuits revolution started with the introduction of the first microprocessor, the 4004 by Intel in 1972 and the 8080 in 1974. Today many companies like Texas Instruments, Infineon,Alliance Semiconductors, Cadence, Synopsys, Celox Networks, Cisco, Micron Tech, National Semiconductors, ST Microelectronics, Qualcomm, Lucent, Mentor Graphics, Analog Devices, Intel, Philips, Motorola and many other firms have been established and are dedicated to the various fields in "VLSI" like Programmable Logic Devices, Hardware Descriptive Languages, Design tools, Embedded systems.

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Article By:

V Poornima

Asst. Professor

ECE Department

Sphoorthy Engineering College

Sphoorthy Engineering College