APPLICATION SPECIFIC INTEGRATED CIRCUIT(ASIC)
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An Application Specific Integrated Circuit or ASIC in common language is a custom chip designed for you and your products alone. An ASIC has all the advantages of integrating your own design into a single IC. These include low power requirements, reliability (smaller PCB, reduced number of discrete components and joints), design security, more economic and reduced size.
ASICs may be classified into Full-Custom, standard cell, gate array, PLD and FPGA. FPGAs are the newest member of the ASIC family and are rapidly growing in importance, replacing TTL in microelectronic systems.
The steps involved in the design of ASICs are: design entry, logic synthesis, system partitioning, pre layout simulation, floor planning, placement, routing, extraction and post layout simulation.
The purpose of design entry is to describe a microelectronic system to a set of electronic-design automation (EDA) tools. Design entry for systems may be low level or high level. The low-level design entry uses Schematic capture. High-level design entry is done with Hardware Description Languages (HDL). Two standard HDLs are VHDL and Verilog.
Perhaps, the most important phase is that of simulation; it can uncover errors before they are set in silicon. Behavioral simulation, functional simulation and static timing analysis are some of the modes of simulation. Testing is also an important phase of ASIC design.
System partitioning, floor planning, placement and routing form the physical part of ASIC design.This paper describes the architecture and introduces the steps involved in the design of an ASIC.
WHAT IS AN ASIC?
An Application Specific Integrated Circuit or ASIC in common language is a custom chip designed for you and your products alone. It is a chip that can be designed by an engineer with no particular knowledge of semiconductor physics or semiconductor processes. The ASIC vendor has created a library of cells and functions that the designer can use. Customers implement their designs in a single silicon die by mapping their functions to these sets of pre-designed library of cells. ASICs are used in a wide variety of products ranging from consumer products such as video games, digital cameras, automobiles and personal computers, to high and technology products such as workstations and supercomputers.
An ASIC has all the advantages of integrating your own design into a single IC. These include low power requirements, reliability (smaller PCB, reduced number of discrete components and joints), design security, more economic and reduced size.
This post was written by: Rajendra Prasad
Rajendra Prasad is a professional blogger, web designer and front end web developer. Follow him on Facebook
