I. Changes in the industrial structure of the world and their development history
Since the US Texas Instrument Company (TI) Invention Integrated Circuit (IC), with the development of silicon plane, two important integrated circuits in the 1960s have been invented in the 1960s. It marks the quantity and quality leap in the era of electronic machine and transistor manufacturing electronics, created an unprecedented emerging industrial integrated circuit industry with extremely strong permeability and strong vitality.
Retrospecting the development of the integrated circuit, we can see that since its clear integrated circuit has been "integrated from the circuit to the system" since the time of the integrated circuit, "From the circuit integration into system integration" is the IC product from a small scale integrated circuit (SSI) to today's large scale integrated circuit ( The ULSI) The best summary of the development process, that is, the development of the entire integrated circuit product has experienced the process from the traditional board system to SYSTEM-ON-A-CHIP. In this historical process, the world IC industry is the development and market demand for technology, and its industrial structure has experienced three changes.
The first change: the primary stage of the development of the IC industry dominated by machining. In the 1970s, mainstream products of integrated circuits were microprocessors, memory, and standard universal logic circuits. This period of IC Manufacturer (IDM) acts as the main role in the IC market, and IC design exists as an affiliate department. At this time IC design and semiconductor process are closely related. The IC design mainly manually, the CAD system is only used as data processing and graphical programming. The IC industry is only in primary stage for production-oriented.
The second change: Foundry and the rise of IC design companies. In the 1980s, the mainstream products of the integrated circuit were microprocessor (MPU), microcontroller (MCU) and special ICs (ASIC). At this time, there is no production line of IC Design Corporation (Fabless), which is combined with standard process processing lines, began to become a new model of the development of integrated circuit industry.
With the wide application and popularization of microprocessors and PCs (especially in the fields of communication, industrial control, consumer electronics), IC industry has begun to enter customers-oriented stages. On the one hand, the IC of the standardized function is difficult to meet the requirements of system cost, reliability, etc., while the whole machine customers are required to increasing the integration of ICs, improve confidentiality, and reduce the size of the chip area to reduce the size of the system, reduce costs Increase the performance ratio of the product, thereby enhance the competitiveness of the product, get more market share and more rich profits; on the other hand, since IC fine processing technology advances, software hardware has become possible, in order to improve the system Speed and simplified procedures, so the ASICs of various hardware structures such as gate arrays, programmable logic (including FPGA), standard units, all custom circuits, etc. have been born, and their proportion has been in 1982 throughout IC sales. 12 %;, With the development of the EDA tool (electronic design automation tool), the PCB design method introduces the IC design, such as the concept, process simulation parameters, and its simulation concepts, and design began to enter the abstraction stage, so that design The process can be existed independently of the production process. Having a far-directed machine manufacturer and entrepreneur include the venture capital fund (VC) to see the market and development prospects of ASIC, and have begun to establish a professional design company and IC design department, a production line-free integrated circuit design company (Fabless) or design The department has established and has developed rapidly. At the same time, it also drives the rise of standard process processing lines. The world's first Foundry factory is a Taiwan Pointer Circuit Company established in 1987. Its founder Zhang Zhongmou has also been known as "the father of crystal chip".
The third change: "Four Industry Separation" IC Industry In the 1990s, with the rise of the Internet, the IC industry broke into the high-level stage of competition-oriented, international competition was competed by the original resources, the price competition turned to talent knowledge competition, intensive Capital competition. It has become the past. For example, in 1990, the United States is representative of Intel, which takes the initiative to give up the DRAM market for the struggle of Japan, and actively give up the DRAM market. This makes people realize that increasingly large integrated circuit industrial systems are not conducive to the development of the entire IC industry, "points" can be fine, "integration" is advantageous. Therefore, the IC industry structure is a trend to highly specialized conversion, and began to form a situation in the design industry, manufacturing, packaging, and test industry (as shown below). In recent years, the development of the global IC industry has become increasingly The more the advantages of this structure are shown. For example, the Taiwan IC industry is because of SMEs, it has formed a highly divided industrial structure. Since 1996, it is affected by the Asian economic crisis, the global semiconductor industry has excessive production, and the benefits are declined, but the IC design industry is Get continuous growth. In particular, the decline of DRAM in 96, 97.98, MPU's decline, the growth rate of the world semiconductor industry has not reached the growth value of the previous 17%, if relying on high investment improvement technology, pursue large silicon Tablets, pursue microfearing, reducing costs from large production, promoting their growth, will be difficult to continue. And IC design companies are closer to the market and understand the market. Through innovative development of high value-added products, they directly promote the update of electronic systems directly; at the same time, profits are obtained in innovation, accumulating capital, driving on the basis of fast, coordinated development Update and new investment in semiconductor equipment; IC design industry as a "faucet" in the integrated circuit industry, injecting new motivation and vitality for the growth of the entire integrated circuit industry. Second, IC classification
The IC can be divided into: Digital IC, analog IC, microwave IC and other ICs, where digital ICs are the most widely used, and the fastest IC variety in recent years. The digital IC is transmitting, processing, and processing digital signals, can be divided into universal digital ICs and dedicated digital ICs.
General IC: refers to the current status and level of digital ICs, reflecting the status and level of digital ICs, such as memory (DRAM), microprocessor (MPU), and microcontroller (MCU), etc..
Dedicated IC (ASIC): is a circuit designed for a specific user, a special or special purpose. At present, the integrated circuit products have the following design, production, and sales models. 1. IC Manufacturer (IDM) is designed by its own production line, packaged, and finished product chips after testing. 2. The IC Design Company (Fabless) is combined with standard process processing lines. The design company handed the final physical layout of the design chip to Foundry processing, and the package test also entrusted professional manufacturers to complete, the final finished chip was sold as IC design company. For example, Fabless is equivalent to the author and publisher, and Foundry is equivalent to the printing factory, and the "faucet" in the industry should be the former.
Third, what is IC design?
The IC design is the process of transforming the system, logic and performance design requirements into specific physical layouts, as well as a process from abstraction processes until the process of final physical implementation. In order to complete this process, people have studied the design methods of hierarchical and structuring: hierarchical design methods can simplify complex systems, and can find errors in a different design level and correct; structured design methods It is divided into a complex abstract system into some operable modules, allowing multiple designers to be designed simultaneously, and some submodules resources can be shared. Fourth, IC Design and Software Development A simple example // Verilog HDL for BYM4, BEH10_BEHAVIORAL MODULE BEH10 (R); OUTPUT R; R; REG [2; 0] I; Initial Begin R = 0; for (i = 0 , i <= 5, i = i 1) r = # (i * 10) i [0]; End diedule This segmentation source program module compiled by the hardware description language, through the EDA software, completed logic level Description and circuit-level description, finally form a layout file, produce a mask version according to the layout file, manufactured under specific process conditions, the finished product chip after the package test has the following functions: If a specific pin input period from the chip is 10 Pulse square r, then output from another specific pin of the chip as the following waveform: IC design is the same as software development (1). In the IC design area, EDA software and computers have been dominated. As shown in the above waveform diagram, the IC design is performed with the hardware description language (HDL) running on the computer. Existing HDL language such as VHDL, Verilog HDL, etc. are similar to the PC software development tool C language. (2) Development process. At present, the IC is designed to use the "self-turning" design method, gradually refine the functions and modules until the various types of cell libraries that can be provided; the entire process is the same as software development. (3) Final product. Like the software, the final product of IC design will be embodied in a carrier. For software is the binary executable code in the disk. For ICs, it is to meet the user's speed and functional product (important signs of IC design level: " The chip of speed power consumption "). The software is reflected by hardware, hardware is the software carrier; for IC design companies, if there is no Foundry line as a machined chip, then its design results will not be reflected, the skin is not depressed, and the hair will be attached.
V. IC design process
IC Design Industrialization Example - HDTV
Part of the HDTV system to reflect my country's independent intellectual property rights in China is the core component - channel decoding chip in the HDTV receiver. From realization, it is mainly an algorithm that cures in chip; from the perspective, It is built from four FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) chips, each of the price is about 20,000 yuan, so that the cost of HDTV receivers is much higher than the price that ordinary people can bear, becoming HDTV technology industrialization Apply a popular bottleneck. If a fully customized method is designed, the price will be reduced to 80 to 20 US dollars, and it can also fully reflect my country's independent intellectual property rights, which has huge economic benefits and social benefits.
Sixth, the trend of the world IC industry developed as "faucet"
