An integrated LSI design aids system

An integrated LSI design aids system

World Abstracts Papers published in 1981-82 which are considered to be of technical merit will be abstracted by Charles E. Jowett and published in thi...

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World Abstracts Papers published in 1981-82 which are considered to be of technical merit will be abstracted by Charles E. Jowett and published in this, and subsequent issues of Microelectronics Journal. Integrated Circuit Technology Memories Microprocessors Optoelectronics Hybrids

Discrete Devices Charged Coupled Devices Materials Production and Processing Testing Applications It is the intention, in successive issues of the Journal, to bring the paper abstracts up-to-date, presen{ing the reader with an easy reference to many of the important papers which have been published in journals throughout the world.

1.

Integrated Circuit Technology

The role of transport in very small devices for VLS!

D. K. F E R R Y and H. L. GRUBIN Over the last two decades, the electronics industry has An integrated LSI design aids system G. MARTIN, J. BERRIE, T. LITTLE, D. MACKAY, been involved in an ongoing revolution in digital largescale integration (LSI). This digital revolution; spawned J. MeVEAN, D. TOMSETI" and L. WESTON The escalating density of integrated circuits provided by in the late 1960's is leaving a permanent imprint on all advances in fabrication technology, together with the aspects of life today, especially as the implementation of increasing complexity of digital logic designs, have microelectronics has spread to the consumer industry, created a steadily-worsening bottleneck in the design Fueled by the drive to less expensive, but more complex and layout of custom LSI's. Competitive pressures on and sophisticated, integrated systems, the growth of LSI the manufacturers of small business computers have has in fact been phenomenal. The complexity of these produced a trend to smaller, cheaper and more powerful circuits, in terms of the number of individual devices on systems, thus necessitating the replacement of'ITLobased a chip, has approximately doubled each year over this SSI/MSI logic by LSI devices. In order to maintain or time span. There are, of course, several factors which improve competitive positions, such repackaging must contribute to this increase in complexity, including major occur quickly, and require very little re-design of the effects arising from increased die size, increased circuit logic. In order to reduce the number of iterations through cleverness, and reduced device size. This latter factor, the design cycle, very high confidence in the correct reduction of the individual feature size in a device, is of functioning of the SLI must be created. Design groups paramount importance and dimensions of laboratory faced with such pressures may find themselves isolated systems are currently down to the sub-micrometre range. fxom an IC fabrication line for commercial, organisational Progress in the microelectornics area is tiedinevitably to or geographical reason; as a result, the time required to the ability to continue to put ever increasing numbers of obtain custom LSI can increase to unacceptable leves. smaller devices on a chip. It is apparent that extra polation Commercial gate arrays, while promising lower fabri- of today's technology will produce individual devices cation costs, often do not come equipped with sufficient whose dimensions are of the order of 0.2-0.5 micrometres. design tools to make them particularly easy to use. Furthermore, the problem of mapping already-existing 2. Memories designs into the range of available cells can be considerable, and the fixed layout of a gate array can cause routing failures. Structured design techniques for VLSP The contiguous disk technology for high density bubble which are potentially very powerful, have not yet been memories commercially proved. In addition, use of such techniques H. JOUVE, J. MAGNIN or these types of application would require considerable A new generation of magnetic bubble memory devices re-design effort. using "contiguous disk" elements as propagation patterns 38

MICROELECTRONICS JOURNAL Vo116 No 4 9 I985 Benn Electronics Publications Ltd. Luton