ECE467: Introduction to VLSI Design

Lecture-1
Introduction to Integrated Circuits:
Historical Developments
Basic Concepts and Definition
Metrics of Design
Igor Paprotny
paprotny@uic.edu

Technological Revolution Fueled by

Integrated Circuits
A tiny tablet PC with less
than 1 thickness can be
give you million times
higher computing power
than the earliest
computer

ENIAC - The first Electronic Computer (1946)

Dimension:
80 Feet Long
8.5 Feet High
Several Feet Wide
Parts:
18000 Vacuum Tubes
2

Telephone- Communicate Greater Distances

Early Days
of
Telephone

Johnson 6 (1875): The Gallows Frame Telephone was one of the earliest phones
Designed by Alexander Graham Bell and built by Thomas A. Watson

The first generation telephone sets were wall mounted, magneto and battery type,
with a crank on the side to generate current for ringing
In the station an operator must be present in front of a switch board to connect the
callers phone line to the receivers phone line
3
The overall operation was mechanical and involved manual operators

Todays Telephone

Small
Signal RF

Power
RF

Power
Management

Digital Cellular Market

(Phones Shipped)

1996 1997 1998 1999 2000

Units

48M

86M 162M 260M 435M

Analog
Baseband
Digital Baseband
(DSP + MCU)

Regular Phone

Personal Organizer

Text and Graphical

Communication

Audio/Video Entertainment

Image Capturing

Internet Browsing

Gaming Device

(data from Texas Instruments)

Todays Telephone

Early Days of Television

An Announcement - July 1928 of the British magazine, called Television.
"Baird Televisors ("seeing-in instruments") will be on sale in the country [England]
at the annual Radio Exhibition to be held at Olympia, September 22nd to 29th,
1928"
Announcement Caption:
"One of the several designs of the new Baird Televisor, which will be marketed here
and in America in September."

From Wikipedia

Seeing instruments: Seeing from distance

6

Television: Past and Present

Dimension:
Size of a standard breakfast table

Dimension:
58 x 35 x 4

Screen:

Screen:

Diagonally 7 Viewable

Diagonally 61 Viewable

Colors and Shades:

Colors and Shades:

2 (black and white)

16.9 Million Different Shades

Which Color You Like?

What is the common Platform for all of these

Remarkable Developments?

Integrated Circuit (IC)

Electrical Circuit and its Classification

Electrical Circuit:

An electrical circuit is a closed loop formed by a power source, and a set of

active and passive elements to process and deliver an electrical signal
(voltage or current).

Passive element:

Electrical characteristics of passive elements mainly depend on the physical

properties and the geometrical shapes of the elements.

These elements can not act as switch or amplifier.

Example:

Resistor,
Inductor,
Capacitor,
Wire
Insulator

Active element:

The electrical characteristics of active elements vary depending on applied

excitation force.

These elements have the ability to act as electrical switches (ON-OFF

characteristics).

These elements can amplify electrical signals.

Examples of:

pn-junction Diode
Transistors: BJT, MOSFET, JFET etc
vacuum tube
10

Electrical Circuit and its Classification

Classification of Electrical Circuit:

Discrete Circuit

Each circuit element (active or passive)

comes as an individual components to be
placed and connected on a PCB board.

Integrated circuit:

Integrated circuit (IC) is referred to a circuit, where all the active and
passive components are fabricated on a single semiconductor substrate,
known as a chip
The components of IC are:

Transistors and Diodes.

Wires and Insulators.
Resistor, Inductor and Capacitors.

The principal element or the main working device in IC is the transistor.

All other components in IC play supporting role for the transistors.
11

Paprotny et al. Sensors and Actuators (A: Physical), 2013

Invention of Transistor
Transistor Definition:
Transistors are electronically controlled switches with a control terminal
and two other terminals that are connected or disconnected depending on
the voltage applied to the control terminal.
Pre-Transistor Era:

Vacuum tube was the technology for most of the electronic circuits before
transistors were invented.

Vacuum tubes ruled in the first half of the 20th century

Vacuum tubes are large, expensive, power-hungry, and unreliable

Excessive power consumption made vacuum tubes obsolete

Point contact transistor:

John Bardeen and Walter Brattain

of Bell Lab invented point contact
transistor in 1947

It was nearly declared military secret

Bell Lab made it public

12

Technology Selection for Integrated Circuits

The beginning of Integrated Circuit (IC):

The concept of IC was introduced by Jack Kilby of Texas Instrument in

1958 to miniaturize electronic circuits by building multiple transistors on a
single substrate.
A two transistors (BJTs) flip-flop had been the first Integrated Circuit
implementation, which was built from germanium slice and gold wires

Bipolar Junction Transistor (BJT):

BJT, invented in 1949 by Schockley, comes in npn or pnp silicon structure

It requires a small current into the base layer that controls large currents
between the emitter and the collector
BJT was more reliable, less noisy, and more power-efficient than first
version of point contact transistor
Invention of BJT and inception of the idea of building IC lead to the
introduction of first set of commercial IC logic gates, called Fairchild
Micrologic Family (1958)
Transistor-Transistor Logic (TTL), pioneered in 1962, became very
successful IC logic family. TTL had the advantage of offering higher
integration density, which made TTL the most popular logic design
approach until 1980s.
13

Bipolar Junction Transistor

14

Technology Selection for Integrated Circuits

Emitter Coupled Logic:

Other logic families were also developed keeping higher performance in

mind.

For example, Emitter Coupled Logic (ECL), which is capable of producing

subnanosecond gates.

ECL 3-input Gate

Motorola 1966

16

Technology Selection for Integrated Circuits

Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors (MOSFET):

The idea of Field Effects devices was originally proposed by German

scientist Julius Lilienfield in 1925 and British scientist Oskar Heil in 1935

Material problems foiled early attempts to make functioning device

MOSFET has three functional terminals: Gate, Source and Drain

In MOSFET, which comes in two flavors NMOS and PMOS, a voltage

applied to the insulated gate controls current between the source and the
drain
Source

Gate

Drain

Source

Gate

Drain

Polysilicon
SiO2

n+

n+
p

NMOS

bulk Si

p+

p+
n

bulk Si

PMOS

17

Technology Selection for Integrated Circuits

MOSFET largely replaced BJT Technology:

The quiescent power dissipated by the base current of BJT limited the
integration density as IC became more complex
Power consumption was the reason that haunted vacuum tube approach.
For the same reason BJT started loosing favor as compared more powerefficient MOSFET technology
MOSFETs offer the advantage of almost zero control current while idle.
Low power consumption of MOSFETs allows very high integration
Improvement of silicon processes made MOSFETs more popular due to
simpler fabrication process, and lower cost and area per device
First generations of MOSFET ICs used PMOS-only technology. But
PMOS-only processes suffered from poor performance, yield, and
reliability
NMOS-only processes became dominant in the 1970s. NMOS transistor
has the advantage of implementing faster gate for the same area compared
to PMOS transistor
But soon Complementary MOS (CMOS) technology replaced every
technology in more than 80% of IC applications

18

Technology Selection for Integrated Circuits

Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS):

In 1963 Frank Wanlass at Fairchild described the first logic gates using
both NMOS and PMOS transistors, earning the name CMOS

Wanlass used discrete transistors, but soon improvement of silicon

technology made CMOS integrated circuits possible

While NMOS process is less expensive than CMOS, NMOS logic gates
still consumes power while idle.

CMOS logic gates consumes almost zero static power

Even the discrete CMOS circuit built by Wanlass consumed only nanowatts of power, six orders of magnitude less than their bipolar counterparts

Power consumption became the major issue in 1980s as hundreds of

thousands of transistors were integrated onto a single chip

CMOS process has become the most widely adopted technology and
replaced most of NMOS and bipolar processes for nearly all digital
applications

Currently CMOS technology holds more than 80% of the market share

19

CMOS Technology

inverter gate
20

More of Historical Developments

First 4 Kbits memory: First memory IC was built in 1970 using MOSFET
Intel later pioneered NMOS technology with its 1101 256-bit static random access
memory

First Microprocessor: First 4-bit Microprocessor (Intel 4004) came in 1972

1970s processes usually had only nMOS transistors

Intel 1101 256-bit SRAM

Intel 4004 4-bit mProc

Intel Pentium 4 mProc

Intel Pentium 4 came in 2003: Contained 55 million transistors

512-Mbit dynamic memory (DRAM): Contained half a billion transistors
21

Historical Growth Rate

Growth Rate:
Number of transistors increased from 2 in the first IC (1958) to 55 millions in Intel
Pentium 4 (2003). A growth corresponds to a compound rate of 53% annually
over 45 years
No other technology or industry in human history has sustained such a high growth
rate for so long. Most other fields involve tradeoffs between performance, power
and price. However, as transistors become smaller, they also become faster and
cheaper
Steady miniaturization of transistors and improvement of process and
manufacturing technologies made it possible
Moores Law:
Gordon Moore the founder of Intel observed in 1965 that plotting the number of
transistors that can be most economically integrated on a chip gives a straight line
on a semi-logarithmic scale. At that time he found that transistor count doubling
every 18 months. This observation has been called Moores Law
In 2013 semiconductor industry manufactured more than one quintillion (1018)
transistors, or 100 million for every human being on this planet
Not only the transistor count, but also the clock frequency or the speed of
integrated circuits have seen an unprecedented rise over the last few decades
22

Historical Growth Rate

Semiconductor Industry
1994: IC industry has become a $100B/year business
Annual 20% growth
2.5 x salary for average U.S. worker

23

Level of Integration
SSI: Small-scale Integration (SSI) circuits has been classified as those with roughly
fewer than 10 gates and about a dozen transistors per gate, such as, 7400 series logic
ICs.
MSI: Medium-scale Integration (MSI) circuits are those with up to 1000 gates per
chip, such as, 74000 series counters
LSI: Large-scale Integration (LSI) circuits have up to 10,000 gates per chip, such as, 8bit microprocessor
It soon became apparent that new names would have to be created every five
years if this naming trend continued and thus the term VLSI is used to describe
all ICs from 1980s onward
VLSI: Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) circuits can now contain hundreds of
thousands of gates with billions of transistors per chip
In some literature the term ULSI (Ultra Large Scale Integration) is used for
current and upcoming integrated circuits, but this term has not yet become
popular.
Integration Levels
SSI:

10 gates

MSI:

1000 gates

LSI:

10,000 gates

VLSI:

> 10k gates

24

Transistor Scaling
Transistor Sizes:

Intel 4004 in 1971 used transistors with minimum dimensions of 10 micrometer,

whereas Pentium 4 in 2003 used 130 nanometer transistors. This corresponds to two
orders of magnitude in reduction over three decades
IC industry has now entered into the Nanometer Regime
As predicted this downward scaling of transistors will continue for at least a decade
Dramatic scaling of all physical and electrical parameters is going on simultaneously

Why Scaling:

Technology shrinks by 0.7/generation

With every generation can integrate 2x more functions per chip; chip cost does not
increase significantly
Cost of a function decreases by 2x
But

How to design chips with more and more functions?

Design engineering population and efficiency does not double every two years

Hence, a need for more efficient design methods

Resolve numerous challenges that arise at every design step in every generation

Exploit different levels of abstraction

25

Scale Perspective of Integrated Circuits

1/107

~ 10 000 km = 1 x 108 m

1m

1/107

300 mm = 3 x

10-1

~ IBM 20 nm process = 2 x 10-8 m