VLSI Technology, Inc., was a company that designed and manufactured custom and semi-customized integrated circuits (ICs). The company was headquartered in Silicon Valley, headquartered at 1109 McKay Drive in San Jose, California, United States. Together with LSI Logic, VLSI Technology defined the cutting edge of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) business, which accelerated the thrust of powerful embedded systems into affordable products.
VLSI was acquired in June 1999, for about $ 1 billion by Philips Electronics and is today a part of the spin-off of Philips NXP Semiconductors. The company was founded in 1979 by a trio of Fairchild Semiconductors through Synertek - Jack Balletto, Dan Floyd and Gunnar Wetlesen - and by Doug Fairbairn of Xerox PARC and Lambda (later VLSI Design).
Alfred J. Stein became the CEO of the company in 1982. VLSI subsequently built its first fab in San Jose; Eventually a second fab was built in San Antonio, Texas. VLSI had its initial public offering in 1983, and publicly traded as (NASDAQ: VLSI). The company was later acquired by Philips and survives to this day as part of NXP Semiconductors.
The original business plan was to be a contract wafers manufacturing company, but risk investors wanted the company to develop IC design tools (Integrated Circuit) to help fill the foundry.
Thanks to its students from Caltech and UC Berkeley, VLSI was a major pioneer in the electronic design automation (EDA) industry. It offered a sophisticated toolkit, originally based on the "lambda-based" design style championed by Carver Mead and Lynn Conway.
VLSI became an early seller of standard cells (cell based technology) to the commercial market in the early 1980s, where the other ASIC-focused company, LSI Logic, was a leader in door arrays. Prior to the VLSI-based mobile offering, the technology was only available primarily in large, vertically integrated companies with semiconductor units such as AT & T and IBM.
The VLSI design tools included not only input and design simulation, but also cell-based routing (chip compiler), a datapath compiler, SRAM and ROM compilers, and a state machine compiler. The tools were an integrated design solution for IC design and not just point tools, or more general system tools. A designer could edit transistor-level polygons and / or logic schemes, then run DRC and LVS, extract distribution parasites and run the Spice simulation, then re-record changes in time or port size in the database Schematic logic. The characterization tools were integrated to generate FrameMaker datasheets for libraries. VLSI eventually rolled out the CAD and Library operation in Compass Design Automation, but never reached the IPO before it was purchased by Avanti Corp.
VLSI's physical design tools were critical not only for its ASIC business, but also to set the bar for the commercial electronic design (EDA) automation industry. When VLSI and its main ASIC competitor, LSI Logic, were establishing the ASIC industry, commercially available tools could not provide the productivity required to support the physical design of hundreds of ASIC designs each year without the deployment of a considerable number of Design engineers. The development of automated design tools companies was a rational decision because there is nothing to buy. The EDA industry finally reached in the late 1980s when Tangent Systems launched its TanCell and TanGate products. In 1989, Tangent was acquired by Cadence Design Systems (founded in 1988).
Unfortunately, for all initial VLSI competencies in design tools, they were not leaders in semiconductor fabrication technology. VLSI had not been timely in developing a 1.0 μm manufacturing process as the rest of the industry moved to that geometry in the late 1980s. VLSI entered a long-term partership technology with Hitachi and finally launched a Cell library and 1.0 μm processes (actually more of a 1.2 μm library with a 1.0 μm gate).
As VLSI struggled to gain parity with the rest of the industry in semiconductor technology, the design flow was rapidly moving to a Verilog HDL and synthesis flow. Cadence acquired Gateway, Verilog's (HDL) hardware design language leader and Synopsys dominated the explosive field of design synthesis.