ASICs and associated CAD software

Silicon-based microelectronics is already today, and will be even more so tomorrow, one of the key drivers in building the new information and communication society of the 21st century. The electronic equipment and systems sector is one of the world's leading industrial sectors. The electronics industry covers several segments. Some require high-performance integrated circuits: these are the sectors that concern computer technologies and telecommunications. For others, less powerful circuits are sufficient: these are the consumer electronics and industrial electronics sectors. Automotive and transport electronics, on the other hand, require reliable circuits to operate in harsh environments. Finally, military and space electronics is a strategic and highly specific sector which, in view of budgetary constraints, increasingly calls for circuits that are satisfied with the manufacturing technologies developed for other segments.

An integrated circuit designed today in submicron CMOS technology uses several tens of millions of very small transistors on a surface area of just a few square centimetres. What's more, it operates at high frequencies (over 2 GHz for today's processors) and dissipates considerable power. The technical performances sought for cell phones are a good illustration of the objectives to be reached in markets where competition is very strong: low weight, low volume, long autonomy, good geographical coverage, low cost. These performances are achieved by integrating all functions on one or two specific integrated circuits.

The number of transistors per integrated circuit doubles every year and a half. This deterministic trend was predicted by "Moore's Law" (named after G. Moore, co-founder of Intel) and has been confirmed over the last thirty years. This prodigious growth has been made possible by advances in transistor architecture and manufacturing technologies, circuit architecture and computer-aided design (CAD) methods. The exponential growth in the number of transistors on a single chip (a chip is the piece of silicon on which the integrated circuit is built), a consequence of advances in manufacturing technologies, means that increasingly complex functions can be integrated, with more and more features, right up to the integration of complete systems; hence the name ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit).