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Faculty of Engineering

PRINCIPLES
OF
VLSI
Khalid Mohammed Ibrahim
khmoibrahim@gmail.com

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Reference

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Transistor Revolution

• Transistor –Bardeen (Bell Labs) in 1947

• Bipolar transistor – Schockley in 1949

• First bipolar digital logic gate – Harris in 1956

• First monolithic IC – Jack Kilby in 1959

• First commercial IC logic gates – Fairchild 1960

• TTL – 1962 into the 1990’s

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 MOSFET Technology

• MOSFET transistor

• CMOS – 1960’s, but plagued with manufacturin

problems

• PMOS in 1960’s (calculators)

• NMOS in 1970’s (4004, 8080) – for speed

• CMOS in 1980’s – preferred MOSFET technolog

because of power benefits

• BiCMOS, Gallium-Arsenide, Silicon-Germanium

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Intel 4004 Microprocessor

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Intel Pentium (IV)
Microprocessor

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 Moore’s Law in Microprocessors

Moore’s Law. He observed that the number of transistors on a chip

roughly doubled every 18 months

1000

100 2X growth in 1.96 years!

10
P6
Transistors

Pentium® proc
1 486
386
0.1 286
8085 8086
0.01 8080
8008
4004
0.001
1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Year
Courtesy, Intel

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 Design Abstraction Levels

SYSTEM

MODULE
+

GATE

CIRCUIT
Vin Vout

DEVICE
G
S D
n+ n+

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MOS Technology Trends

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Transistors in Intel microprocessors [Intel10]

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Clock frequencies of Intel microprocessors

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Process generations. Future predictions from [SIA2007].

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 Digression: Silicon Semiconductors
Modern electronic chips are built mostly on silicon substrates
Silicon is a Group IV semiconducting material
crystal lattice: covalent bondshold each atom to four neighbors

Si Si Si

Si Si Si

Si Si Si

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Dopants
Silicon is a semiconductor at room temperature

Pure silicon has few free carriers and conducts poorly

Adding dopants increases the conductivity

Dopant from Group V (e.g. As, P): extra electron (n-type) Current of Electrons

Dopant from Group III (e.g. B, Al): missing electron, called hole (p-type) Current of Holes

Si Si Si Si Si Si
- +
+ -
Si As Si Si B Si

Si Si Si Si Si Si

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p-n Junctions
First semiconductor (two terminal) devices
A junction between p-type and n-type
semiconductor forms a diode.
Current flows only in one direction
Current flow direction

p-type n-type
Electron flow direction

anode cathode

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 A Brief History For IC

1958: First integrated circuit

Flip-flop using two transistors
Built by Jack Kilby (Nobel Laureate) at Texas Instruments
Robert Noyce (Fairchild) is also considered as a co-inventor

Kilby’s IC

smithsonianchips.si.edu/ augarten/

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 A Brief History, contd.

First Planer IC built in 1961

Intel Pentium 4 processor (55 million transistors) 2003
512 Mbit DRAM (> 0.5 billion transistors) 53%
compound annual growth rate over 45 years
No other technology has grown so fast so long
Driven by miniaturization of transistors
Smaller is cheaper, faster, lower in power!
Revolutionary effects on society

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 MOS Integrated Circuits
1970’s processes usually had only nMOS transistors
Inexpensive, but consume power while idle
1980s-present: CMOS processes for low idle power

Intel 1101 256-bit SRAM Intel 4004 4-bit Proc

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 Moore’s Law
1965: Gordon Moore plotted transistor on each chip
Fit straight line on semilog scale
Transistor counts have doubled every 18 months

Integration Levels

SSI: 10 gates

MSI: 1000 gates

LSI: 10,000 gates

VLSI: > 10k gates

http://www.intel.com/technology/silicon/mooreslaw/

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Pentium 4 Processor

http://www.intel.com/intel/intelis/museum/online/hist_micro/hof/index.htm

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