VLSI Technology
This article needs additional citations for verification. (January 2021) |
Industry | Electronics |
---|---|
Founded | 1979 |
Founders |
|
Defunct | June 1999 |
Fate | Acquired by Philips Electronics |
Successor | NXP Semiconductors |
Headquarters | , United States |
VLSI Technology, Inc., was an American company that designed and manufactured custom and semi-custom
Initially the company often referred to itself as "VTI" (for VLSI Technology Inc.), and adopted a distinctive "VTI" logo. But it was forced to drop that designation in the mid-1980s because of a trademark conflict.
VLSI was acquired in June 1999, for about $1 billion, by Philips Electronics and is today a part of the Philips spin-off NXP Semiconductors.
History
The company was founded in 1979, by a trio from
Alfred J. Stein became the
The original business plan was to be a contract wafer fabrication company, but the venture investors wanted the company to develop IC (Integrated Circuit) 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 (EDA) industry. It offered a sophisticated package of tools, originally based on the 'lambda-based' design style advocated by Carver Mead and Lynn Conway.[3]
An early challenge for the fledgling company was the so-called Bagpipe project. In January 1982,
VLSI became an early vendor of standard cell (cell-based technology) to the merchant market in the early 1980s where the other ASIC-focused company, LSI Logic, was a leader in
VLSI's design tools included not only design entry and simulation but eventually also 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.
In March 1991, VLSI spun off its IC design tools group into a wholly owned subsidiary,
VLSI's physical design tools were critical not only to its ASIC business, but also acted as significant drivers for the broader electronic design automation (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 driven by a judgement that other in-market products were not sufficient or adaptable enough for VLSI's use case. Other significant market entrants with similar capabilities arrived in late 1980s when Tangent Systems released its TanCell and TanGate products. In 1989, Tangent was acquired by Cadence Design Systems (founded in 1988).
By the early 1990s, VLSI had not been timely in adopting a 1.0 μm manufacturing process as the rest of the industry moved to that geometry in the late 1980s. VLSI entered a long-term technology partnership with Hitachi 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
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.
In the early 1990s, VLSI produced a first-party PC chipset. This product was developed by five engineers using the "Megacells" in the VLSI library. In time, this business developed into a significant revenue stream. The chipsets designed and manufactured by VLSI integrated much of the peripheral I/O logic and thereby substantially lowered the cost of PCs that used Intel or Motorola processors. This included the early Apple Power Macintosh PCs which used the Motorola 68030 and 68040. Some innovations included the integration of PCI bridge logic and the GraphiCore 2D graphics accelerator.
The GraphiCore project was formed and led by Desi Rhoden in 1994. It was notable for being a fresh design, without the baggage of legacy EGA/VGA logic, and for direct support of synchronous DRAM, the forerunner of DDR memory. Desi Rhoden later founded AMI, a consortium of all the major DRAM vendors, which created important standards in DDR memory design. VLSI eventually ceded the chipset 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
Scientists and innovations from the 'design technology' part of VLSI found their way to
Global expansion, ARM, GSM and Philips/NXP
VLSI maintained operations throughout the US, and in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan,
VLSI's design office in Richardson, Texas, was responsible for the design of many large, standard cell ASICS in the 1990s, including the first floating-point co-processors for Cyrix and Digital signal processors for telecom switching and echo-cancellation equipment for Alcatel-Lucent.
In 1990, VLSI Technology,
In 1997, VLSI Technology offered the first ARM chipset for Set-top box vendors for the cable and satellite TV industries named VISTA (VLSI Integrated Set-Top Architecture). Previously, STB chipsets were custom designed for single customers only and were not available to the emerging merchant market. But, VISTA was a merchant market, 4-chip set that featured an ARM7TDMI processor core, transport and demux and a Mediamatics MPEG 1/2 decoder with On Screen Display logic.
Stimulated by its growth and success in the wireless handset IC area, Philips Electronics acquired VLSI in June 1999, for about $1 billion. The former components survive to this day as part of Philips spin-off NXP Semiconductors.
Products
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (November 2014) |
- AL153 VT16DPS
See also
- Design rule checking
- Electronic design automation (EDA)
- Semiconductor device
- Very-large-scale integration
- Power Macintosh
- DDR3 SDRAM
- Set-top box
- Cyrix
- Alcatel-Lucent
References
- ^ Business Week, March 21, 1983, p. 134
- ^ EE Times, May 3, 1999. Accessed 14 November 2019
- ^ L. Conway, 2012. "Reminiscences of the VLSI Revolution". Accessed 14 November 2019
- ^ Andy Herzfeld. Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made. O'Reilly 2005. p. 122, where the company is erroneously identified as VLSI Design.
- ^ Computer History Museum. Interview with Douglas Fairbairn. 6 October 2016. Oral History Collection catalog number 102717219. Accessed 11 November 2019.
- ^ EE Times, March 11, 1991