ILLUSTRATED HANDBOOK OFVLSI Design

by combining thousands of transistors into a single chip. Before the introduction of VLSI technology, most ICs had a limited set of functions they could perform. An electronic circuit might consist of a CPU, ROM, RAM and other glue logic. The electronics industry has achieved a phenomenal growth over the last few decades, mainly due to the rapid advances in large scale integration technologies and system design applications. With the advent of very large scale integration (VLSI) designs, the number of applications of integrated circuits (ICs) in high-performance computing, controls, telecommunications, image and video processing, and consumer electronics has been rising at a very fast pace.

Illustrated Handbook of VLSI Design presents the comprehensive coverage of the basic principles, methodologies and techniques that are common to low power digital designs. The advantages and disadvantages of a particular technique are discussed. Gone are the days when huge computers made of vacuum tubes sat humming in entire dedicated rooms and could do about 360 multiplications of 10 digit numbers in a second. Modern day computers are getting smaller, faster, and cheaper and more power efficient every progressing second. The relevance of VLSI in performance computing, telecommunications, and consumer electronics has been expanding progressively, and at a very hasty pace. Bluetooth is a technology and standard, designed as a wireless-cable replacement to connect a wide range of devices. Unlike wireless LANs such as 802.11b, it was designed to be low power, operate over a short range, and support both data and voice services. It enables peer-to-peer communications among many types of handheld and mobile devices. Furthermore, it provides a conceptually simple communication model and lets these devices exchange information and work together to benefit the user. Subsequent advances added more transistors, and as a consequence, more individual functions or systems were integrated over time. The first integrated circuits held only a few devices, perhaps as many as ten diodes, transistors, resistors and capacitors, making it possible to fabricate one or more logic gates on a single device. Now known retrospectively as small-scale integration (SSI), improvements in technique led to devices with hundreds of logic gates, known as medium-scale integration (MSI). Further improvements led to large-scale integration (LSI), i.e. systems with at least a thousand logic gates. Current technology has moved far past this mark and today?s microprocessors have many millions of gates and billions of individual transistors. Illustrating the physical understanding of underlying principles of the subject, the Handbook is aimed primarily for students and researchers dealing with VLSI design.