05-05-2012, 01:53 PM
CS250 VLSI Systems Design
lec01.pdf (Size: 3.28 MB / Downloads: 38)
IC Design in the 70’s and early 80’s
The Intel 4004 microprocessor, which was introduced in 1971.
The 4004 contained 2300 transistors and performed 60,000
calculations per second. Courtesy: Intel.
Introduced to help
sell memory chips!
Federico Faggin,
Ted Hoff,
Stan Mazor
‣ Circuit design, layout, and processing tightly linked.
‣ Logic design and layout was “random”
‣ Chip design was the domain of industry (Fairchild, Intel, Texas
CS At Caltech
‣ Ivan Sutherland became founding head of the computer science division at CIT in
1974 (after leaving E&S)
‣ He and Mead teamed up to get the division off the ground making IC design
(Integrated Systems) a key component of the research and teaching.
‣ My take:
‣ These two believed that IC design was at the heart of computer science
because CS was largely about inventing and building computing devices.
‣ The future of computing was integrated circuits:
‣ Very flexible, “boundless” growth potential (was on an exponential grow
curve with no end in sight!)
‣ Close to “pure thought” with few constraints and “nasty realities”
‣ The potential of “LSI” was not going to be reached with the status quo in
industry.
Design Representations (1)
‣ Previously, to generate the mask information for fabrication, the
designed needed intimate knowledge of the manufacturing
process. Even once this knowledge was distilled to a set of
“Geometric Design Rules”, this set of rules was voluminous with
many special cases.
‣ Mead and associates come up with a much simplified set of design
rules (single page description). A sort of “API” or abstraction of
the process (back end processing could automatically convert this
information into masks).