INTRODUCTION TO ASICs
pronounced a-sick Figure 1.1(a) shows an IC package (this is a pin-grid array, or PGA, shown upside down; the pins will go through holes in a printed-circuit board). People often call the package a chip, but, as you can see in Figure 1.1(b), the silicon chip itself (more properly called a die ) is mounted in the cavity under the sealed lid. A PGA package is usually made from a ceramic material, but plastic packages are also common.
FIGURE 1.1 An integrated circuit (IC). (a) A pin-grid array (PGA) package. (b) The silicon die or chip is under the package lid.
The physical size of a silicon die varies from a few millimeters on a side to over 1 inch on a side, but instead we often measure the size of an IC by the number of logic gates or the number of transistors that the IC contains. Often we just use the term gates instead of gate equivalents when we are measuring chip sizenot to be confused with the gate terminal of a transistor. The semiconductor industry has evolved from the first ICs of the early 1970s and matured rapidly since then. Early small-scale integration ( SSI ) ICs contained a few (1 to 10) logic gates The era of medium-scale integration ( MSI ) increased the range of integrated logic available to counters and similar, larger scale, logic functions. The era of large-scale integration ( LSI ) packed even larger logic functions, such as the first microprocessors, into a single chip. The era of very large-scale integration ( VLSI ) now offers 64-bit microprocessors, complete with cache memory and floating-point arithmetic unitswell over a million transistorson a single piece of silicon. As CMOS process technology improves, transistors continue to get smaller and ICs hold more and more transistors. Some people (especially in Japan) use the term ultralarge scale integration ( ULSI ), but most people stop at the term VLSI.
The earliest ICs used bipolar technology and the majority of logic ICs used either transistortransistor logic ( TTL ) or emitter-coupled logic (ECL). Although invented before the bipolar transistor, the metal-oxide-silicon ( MOS ) metal-gate n -channel MOS ( nMOS or NMOS ) technology developed in the 1970s. By the early 1980s the aluminum gates of the transistors were replaced by polysilicon gates, but the name MOS remained. CMOS ICs have established a dominant position, are manufactured in much greater volume than any other technology, and therefore, because of the economy of scale, the cost of CMOS ICs is less than a bipolar or BiCMOS IC for the same function. Bipolar and BiCMOS ICs are still used for special needs One of the first conferences to be devoted to this rapidly emerging segment of the IC industry was the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), and the proceedings of this annual conference form a useful reference to the development of custom ICs. As different types of custom ICs began to evolve for different types of applications, these new ICs gave rise to a new term: application-specific IC, or ASIC. Now we have the IEEE International ASIC Conference , which tracks advances in ASICs separately from other types of custom ICs. Although the exact definition of an ASIC is difficult, we shall look at some examples to help clarify what people in the IC industry understand by the term. Examples of ICs that are not ASICs include standard parts such as: memory chips sold as a commodity itemROMs, DRAM, and SRAM; microprocessors; TTL or TTL-equivalent ICs at SSI, MSI, and LSI levels. Examples of ICs that are ASICs include: a chip for a toy bear that talks; a chip for a satellite; a chip designed to handle the interface between memory and a microprocessor for a workstation CPU; and a chip containing a microprocessor as a cell together with other logic. As a general rule, if you can find it in a data book, then it is probably not an ASIC, but there are some exceptions. For example, two ICs that might or might not be considered ASICs are a controller chip for a PC and a chip for a modem. Both of these examples are specific to an application (shades of an ASIC) but are sold to many different system vendors (shades of a standard part). ASICs such as these are sometimes called application-specific standard products ( ASSPs ).
