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Very-large-scale integration (VLSI) is the process of creating an integrated circuit (IC) by combining millions or billions of MOS transistors onto a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when MOS integrated circuit (metal oxide semiconductor) chips were developed and then widely adopted, enabling complex semiconductor and telecommunications technologies.
The VLSI Project was a DARPA-program initiated by Robert Kahn in 1978 [1] that provided research funding to a wide variety of university-based teams in an effort to improve the state of the art in microprocessor design, then known as Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI).
The Mead–Conway VLSI chip design revolution, or Mead and Conway revolution, was a very-large-scale integration design revolution starting in 1978 which resulted in a worldwide restructuring of academic materials in computer science and electrical engineering education, and was paramount for the development of industries based on the application of microelectronics.
In semiconductor design, standard-cell methodology is a method of designing application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) with mostly digital-logic features. Standard-cell methodology is an example of design abstraction, whereby a low-level very-large-scale integration layout is encapsulated into an abstract logic representation (such as a NAND gate).
The earliest EDA tools were produced academically. One of the most famous was the "Berkeley VLSI Tools Tarball", a set of UNIX utilities used to design early VLSI systems. Widely used were the Espresso heuristic logic minimizer, [6] responsible for circuit complexity reductions and Magic, [7] a computer-aided design
In computer engineering, a hardware description language (HDL) is a specialized computer language used to describe the structure and behavior of electronic circuits, usually to design application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and to program field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).
However, the basic premise of a structured ASIC is that both manufacturing cycle time and design cycle time are reduced compared to cell-based ASIC, by virtue of there being pre-defined metal layers (thus reducing manufacturing time) and pre-characterization of what is on the silicon (thus reducing design cycle time).
Physical design is based on a netlist which is the end result of the synthesis process. Synthesis converts the RTL design usually coded in VHDL or Verilog HDL to gate-level descriptions which the next set of tools can read/understand. This netlist contains information on the cells used, their interconnections, area used, and other details.