Future technological and economic prospects for VLSI

Abstract

Technological trends for VLSI are discussed, with emphasis on process/device technology and function/performance forecasts. Economic trends are then examined. The production cost and design cost of VLSI are analyzed. Particular attention is given to the production cost of VLSI, for example, DRAMs (dynamic random access memory) and gate arrays, which have driven the progress in silicon-based-memory process technology and in ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) design technology, respectively. Future production-cost trends are estimated for both.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>