VLSI Technology
Encyclopedia
VLSI Technology, Inc was a company which designed and manufactured custom and semi-custom IC
Integrated circuit
An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is an electronic circuit manufactured by the patterned diffusion of trace elements into the surface of a thin substrate of semiconductor material...

s. The company was based in Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations...

, with headquarters at 1109 McKay Drive in San Jose, California
San Jose, California
San Jose is the third-largest city in California, the tenth-largest in the U.S., and the county seat of Santa Clara County which is located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay...

. Along with LSI Logic, VLSI Technology defined the leading edge of the application-specific integrated circuit
Application-specific integrated circuit
An application-specific integrated circuit is an integrated circuit customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use. For example, a chip designed solely to run a cell phone is an ASIC...

 (ASIC) business, which accelerated the push of powerful embedded systems into affordable products.

The company was founded in 1979 by a trio from Fairchild Semiconductor
Fairchild Semiconductor
Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc. is an American semiconductor company based in San Jose, California. Founded in 1957, it was a pioneer in transistor and integrated circuit manufacturing...

 by way of Synertek - Jack Balletto, Dan Floyd, Gunnar Wetlesen - and by Doug Fairbairn of Xerox PARC
Xerox PARC
PARC , formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and co-development company in Palo Alto, California, with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology and hardware systems....

 and Lambda (later VLSI Design) magazine.

Alfred J. Stein became the CEO of the company in 1982. Subsequently VLSI built its first fab in San Jose; eventually a second fab was built in San Antonio, Texas
San Antonio, Texas
San Antonio is the seventh-largest city in the United States of America and the second-largest city within the state of Texas, with a population of 1.33 million. Located in the American Southwest and the south–central part of Texas, the city serves as the seat of Bexar County. In 2011,...

. VLSI had its initial public offering
Initial public offering
An initial public offering or stock market launch, is the first sale of stock by a private company to the public. It can be used by either small or large companies to raise expansion capital and become publicly traded enterprises...

 in 1983, and was listed on the stock market
Stock market
A stock market or equity market is a public entity for the trading of company stock and derivatives at an agreed price; these are securities listed on a stock exchange as well as those only traded privately.The size of the world stock market was estimated at about $36.6 trillion...

 as . The company was later acquired by Philips
Philips
Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. , more commonly known as Philips, is a multinational Dutch electronics company....

 and survives to this day as part of NXP Semiconductors.

Advanced tools for VLSI design

The original business plan was to be a contract wafer fabrication company, but the venture investors wanted the company to develop IC (Integrated Circuit)
Integrated circuit
An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is an electronic circuit manufactured by the patterned diffusion of trace elements into the surface of a thin substrate of semiconductor material...

 design tools to help fill the foundry.

Thanks to its Caltech and UC Berkeley students, VLSI was an important pioneer in the electronic design automation
Electronic design automation
Electronic design automation is a category of software tools for designing electronic systems such as printed circuit boards and integrated circuits...

 industry. It offered a sophisticated package of tools, originally based on the 'lambda-based' design style advocated by Carver Mead
Carver Mead
Carver Andress Mead is a US computer scientist. He currently holds the position of Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology , having taught there for over 40 years.Mead studied electrical engineering at Caltech, getting...

 and Lynn Conway
Lynn Conway
Lynn Conway is an American computer scientist, electrical engineer, inventor, trans woman, and activist for the transgender community....

.

VLSI became an early vendor of standard cell (cell-based technology) to the merchant market in the early 80s where the other ASIC-focused company, LSI Logic, was a leader in gate array
Gate array
A gate array or uncommitted logic array is an approach to the design and manufacture of application-specific integrated circuits...

s. Prior to VLSI's cell-based offering, the technology had been primarily available only within large vertically integrated companies with semiconductor units such as AT&T
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...

 and IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

.

VLSI's design tools eventually included not only design entry and simulation but eventually 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 purpose system tools. A designer could edit transistor-level polygons and/or logic schematics, then run DRC and LVS, extract parasitics from the layout and run Spice simulation, then back-annotate the timing or gate size changes into the logic schematic database. Characterization tools were integrated to generate FrameMaker Data Sheets for Libraries. VLSI eventually spun off the CAD and Library operation into Compass Design Automation but it never reached IPO before it was purchased by Avanti Corp.

VLSI's physical design tools were critical not only to its ASIC business, but also in setting the bar for the commercial EDA industry. When VLSI and its main ASIC competitor, LSI Logic, were establishing the ASIC industry, commercially-available tools could not deliver the productivity necessary to support the physical design of hundreds of ASIC designs each year without the deployment of a substantial number of layout engineers. The companies' development of automated layout tools was a rational "make because there's nothing to buy" decision. The EDA industry finally caught up in the late 1980s when Tangent Systems released its TanCell and TanGate products. In 1989, Tangent was acquired by Cadence Design Systems (founded in 1988).

Unfortunately, for all VLSI's initial competence in design tools, they were not leaders in semiconductor manufacturing 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 80s. VLSI entered a long-term technology parthership with Hitachi
Hitachi
Hitachi is a multinational corporation specializing in high-technology.Hitachi may also refer to:*Hitachi, Ibaraki, Japan*Hitachi province, former province of Japan*Prince Hitachi and Princess Hitachi, members of the Japanese imperial family...

 and finally released a 1.0 µm process and cell library (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 moving rapidly to a Verilog HDL and synthesis flow. Cadence acquired Gateway, the leader in Verilog hardware design language (HDL) and Synopsys
Synopsys
Synopsys, Inc. is one of the largest companies in the Electronic Design Automation industry. Synopsys' first and best-known product is Design Compiler, a logic-synthesis tool. Synopsys offers a wide range of other products used in the design of an application-specific integrated circuit...

 was dominating the exploding field of design synthesis. As VLSI's tools were being eclipsed, VLSI waited too long to open the tools up to other fabs and Compass Design Automation was never a viable competitor to industry leaders.

Meanwhile, VLSI entered the merchant high speed static RAM (SRAM) market as they needed a product to drive the semiconductor process technology development. All the large semiconductor companies built high speed SRAMs with cost structures VLSI could never match. VLSI withdrew once it was clear that the Hitachi process technology partnership was working.

ARM Ltd was formed in 1990 as a semiconductor intellectual property licensor, backed by Acorn, Apple and VLSI. VLSI became a licensee of the powerful ARM processor
ARM architecture
ARM is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by ARM Holdings. It was named the Advanced RISC Machine, and before that, the Acorn RISC Machine. The ARM architecture is the most widely used 32-bit ISA in numbers produced...

 and ARM finally funded processor tools. Initial adoption of the ARM processor was slow. Few applications could justify the overhead of an embedded 32 bit processor. In fact, despite the addition of further licensees, the ARM processor enjoyed little market success until they developed the novel 'thumb' extensions. Ericsson adopted the ARM processor in a VLSI chipset for its GSM handset designs in the early 1990s. It was the GSM boost that is the foundation of ARM the company/technology that it is today.

Only in PC chipset
Chipset
A chipset, PC chipset, or chip set refers to a group of integrated circuits, or chips, that are designed to work together. They are usually marketed as a single product.- Computers :...

s, did VLSI dominate in the early 90s. This product was developed by five engineers using the 'Megacells" in the VLSI library that led to a business unit at VLSI that almost equaled its ASIC business in revenue. VLSI eventually ceded the market to Intel because Intel was able to package-sell its processors, chipsets, and even board level products together.

VLSI also had an early partnership with PMC, a design group that had been nurtured of British Columbia Bell. When PMC wanted to divest its semiconductor intellectual property venture, VLSI's bid was beaten by a creative deal by Sierra Semiconductor. The telecom business unit management at VLSI opted to go it alone. PMC Sierra became one of the most important telecom ASSP vendors.

Scientists and innovations from the 'design technology' part of VLSI found their way to Cadence Design Systems
Cadence Design Systems
Cadence Design Systems, Inc is an electronic design automation software and engineering services company, founded in 1988 by the merger of SDA Systems and ECAD, Inc...

 (by way of Redwood Design Automation). Compass Design Automation (VLSI's CAD and Library spin-off) was sold to Avant! Corporation, which itself was acquired by Synopsys.

Global expansion

VLSI maintained operations throughout the USA, and in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Singapore
Singapore
Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...

 and Taiwan
Taiwan
Taiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...

. One of its key sites was in Tempe, Arizona
Tempe, Arizona
Tempe is a city in Maricopa County, Arizona, USA, with the Census Bureau reporting a 2010 population of 161,719. The city is named after the Vale of Tempe in Greece. Tempe is located in the East Valley section of metropolitan Phoenix; it is bordered by Phoenix and Guadalupe on the west, Scottsdale...

, where a family of highly successful chipsets was developed for the IBM PC
IBM PC
The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981...

.

In 1990, VLSI Technology, along with Acorn Computers and Apple Computer
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...

 were the founding investing partners in ARM Ltd.

Ericsson
Ericsson
Ericsson , one of Sweden's largest companies, is a provider of telecommunication and data communication systems, and related services, covering a range of technologies, including especially mobile networks...

 of Sweden
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

, after many years of fruitful collaboration, was by 1998 VLSI's largest customer, with annual revenue of $120 million. VLSI's datapath compiler (VDP) was the value-added differentiator that opened the door at Ericsson in 1987/8. The silicon revenue and GPM enabled by VDP must make it one of the most successful pieces of customer-configurable, non-memory silicon intellectual property
Silicon intellectual property
Silicon Intellectual Property is a business model for a semiconductor company where the company licenses its technology to a customer as intellectual property. This is a type of fabless semiconductor company which doesn't provide physical chips to its customers but merely facilitates the...

 (SIP) in the history of the industry. Within the Wireless Products division, based at Sophia-Antipolis in France, VLSI developed a range of algorithms and circuits for the GSM standard and for cordless standards such as the European DECT and the Japanese PHS
Personal Handy-phone System
The Personal Handy-phone System , also marketed as the Personal Access System and commercially branded as Xiaolingtong in China, is a mobile network system operating in the 1880–1930 MHz frequency band, used mainly in Japan, China, Taiwan, and some other Asian countries and...

. Stimulated by its growth and success in the wireless handset IC area, Philips Electronics
Philips
Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. , more commonly known as Philips, is a multinational Dutch electronics company....

 acquired VLSI in June 1999, for about $1 billion. The former components survive to this day as part of Philips spin-off NXP Semiconductors.

See also

  • Design rules checking
  • Electronic design automation
    Electronic design automation
    Electronic design automation is a category of software tools for designing electronic systems such as printed circuit boards and integrated circuits...

  • Semiconductor device
    Semiconductor device
    Semiconductor devices are electronic components that exploit the electronic properties of semiconductor materials, principally silicon, germanium, and gallium arsenide, as well as organic semiconductors. Semiconductor devices have replaced thermionic devices in most applications...

  • Very-large-scale integration
    Very-large-scale integration
    Very-large-scale integration is the process of creating integrated circuits by combining thousands of transistors into a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when complex semiconductor and communication technologies were being developed. The microprocessor is a VLSI device.The first semiconductor...


External links

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