Historical Perspective

The electronics industry has developed at a breakneck pace over the last two decades, owing primarily to rapid advancements in integration technologies and large-scale systems design - in other words, the introduction of VLSI. The number of integrated circuit applications in high-performance computing, telecommunications, and consumer electronics has been steadily increasing at a rapid rate.The requisite computational power (or, in other words, intelligence) of these applications is typically the driving force behind the field's rapid growth.

The need to incorporate these functions in a small system/package is growing as more complex functions are needed in various data processing and telecommunications devices. For almost three decades, the degree of integration, as calculated by the number of logic gates in a monolithic chip, has been steadily increasing, owing to rapid advances in processing and interconnect technology.The given figure shows the evolution of logic complexity in integrated circuits over the last three decades. .

Figure: Evolution of logic complexity in integrated circuits.

The important message here is that the logic complexity per chip has been (and still is) increasing exponentially. The monolithic integration of a large number of functions on a single chip usually provides:

ompactness, because less area/volume
Less power consumption
At system level testing requirements are less
Mainly due to improved on-chip interconnects it is highly reliable
Higher speed, due to significantly reduced interconnection length
Significant cost savings

Development in device manufacturing technology, and especially the steady reduction of minimum feature size (minimum length of a transistor or an interconnect realizable on chip) is important.

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