1、IntegratedCircuits集成电路电子信息类专业英语计算机类专业英语20页Integrated Circuits(集成电路)The Integrated Circuit Digital logic and electronic circuits derive their functionality from electronic switches called transistor. Roughly speaking, the transistor can be likened to an electronically controlled valve whereby energy
2、applied to one connection of the valve enables energy to flow between two other connections.By combining multiple transistors, digital logic building blocks such as AND gates and flip-flops are formed. Transistors, in turn, are made from semiconductors. Consult a periodic table of elements in a coll
3、ege chemistry textbook, and you will locate semiconductors as a group of elements separating the metals and nonmetals.They are called semiconductors because of their ability to behave as both metals and nonmetals. A semiconductor can be made to conduct electricity like a metal or to insulate as a no
4、nmetal does. These differing electrical properties can be accurately controlled by mixing the semiconductor with small amounts of other elements. This mixing is called doping. A semiconductor can be doped to contain more electrons (N-type) or fewer electrons (P-type). Examples of commonly used semic
5、onductors are silicon and germanium. Phosphorous and boron are two elements that are used to dope N-type and P-type silicon, respectively. A transistor is constructed by creating a sandwich of differently doped semiconductor layers. The two most common types of transistors, the bipolar-junction tran
6、sistor (BJT) and the field-effect transistor (FET) are schematically illustrated in Figure 2.1.This figure shows both the silicon structures of these elements and their graphical symbolic representation as would be seen in a circuit diagram. The BJT shown is an NPN transistor, because it is composed
7、 of a sandwich of N-P-N doped silicon. When a small current is injected into the base terminal, a larger current is enabled to flow from the collector to the emitter.The FET shown is an N-channel FET, which is composed of two N-type regions separated by a P-type substrate. When a voltage is applied
8、to the insulated gate terminal, a current is enabled to flow from the drain to the source. It is called N-channel, because the gate voltage induces an N-channel within the substrate, enabling current to flow between the N-regions. Another basic semiconductor structure is a diode, which is formed sim
9、ply by a junction of N-type and P-type silicon. Diodes act like one-way valves by conducting current only from P to N. Special diodes can be created that emit light when a voltage is applied. Appropriately enough, these components are called light emitting diodes, or LEDs. These small lights are man
10、ufactured by the millions and are found in diverse applications from telephones to traffic lights. The resulting small chip of semiconductor material on which a transistor or diode is fabricated can be encased in a small plastic package for protection against damage and contamination from the outsid
11、e world.Small wires are connected within this package between the semiconductor sandwich and pins that protrude from the package to make electrical contact with other parts of the intended circuit. Once you have several discrete transistors, digital logic can be built by directly wiring these compon
12、ents together. The circuit will function, but any substantial amount of digital logic will be very bulky, because several transistors are required to implement each of the various types of logic gates. At the time of the invention of the transistor in 1947 by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and Willi
13、am Shockley, the only way to assemble multiple transistors into a single circuit was to buy separate discrete transistors and wire them together. In 1959, Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce independently invented a means of fabricating multiple transistors on a single slab of semiconductor material. Their
14、invention would come to be known as the integrated circuit, or IC, which is the foundation of our modern computerized world. An IC is so called because it integrates multiple transistors and diodes onto the same small semiconductor chip. Instead of having to solder individual wires between discrete
15、components, an IC contains many small components that are already wired together in the desired topology to form a circuit. A typical IC, without its plastic or ceramic package, is a square or rectangular silicon die measuring from 2 to 15 mm on an edge. Depending on the level of technology used to
16、manufacture the IC, there may be anywhere from a dozen to tens of millions of individual transistors on this small chip. This amazing density of electronic components indicates that the transistors and the wires that connect them are extremely small in size. Dimensions on an IC are measured in units
17、 of micrometers, with one micrometer (1mm) being one millionth of a meter. To serve as a reference point, a human hair is roughly 100mm in diameter. Some modern ICs contain components and wires that are measured in increments as small as 0.1mm! Each year, researchers and engineers have been finding
18、new ways to steadily reduce these feature sizes to pack more transistors into the same silicon area, as indicated in Figure 2.2. When an IC is designed and fabricated, it generally follows one of two main transistor technologies: bipolar or metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS). Bipolar processes create B
19、JTs, whereas MOS processes create FETs. Bipolar logic was more common before the 1980s, but MOS technologies have since accounted the great majority of digital logic ICs. N-channel FETs are fabricated in an NMOS process, and P-channel FETs are fabricated in a PMOS process. In the 1980s, complementar
20、y-MOS, or CMOS, became the dominant process technology and remains so to this day. CMOS ICs incorporate both NMOS and PMOS transistors. Application Specific Integrated Circuit An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) is an integrated circuit (IC) customized for a particular use, rather than
21、 intended for general-purpose use. For example, a chip designed solely to run a cell phone is an ASIC. In contrast, the 7400 series and 4000 series integrated circuits are logic building blocks that can be wired together for use in many different applications. As feature sizes have shrunk and design
22、 tools improved over the years, the maximum complexity (and hence functionality) possible in an ASIC has grown from 5,000 gates to over 100 million.Modern ASICs often include entire 32-bit processors, memory blocks including ROM, RAM, EEPROM, Flash and other large building blocks. Such an ASIC is of
23、ten termed a SoC (System-on-Chip). Designers of digital ASICs use a hardware description language (HDL), such as Verilog or VHDL, to describe the functionality of ASICs. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) are the modern day equivalent of 7400 series logic and a breadboard, containing programmable
24、 logic blocks and programmable interconnects that allow the same FPGA to be used in many different applications. For smaller designs and/or lower production volumes, FPGAs may be more cost effective than an ASIC design. The non-recurring engineering cost (the cost to setup the factory to produce a p
25、articular ASIC) can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.The general term application specific integrated circuit includes FPGAs, but most designers use ASIC only for non-field programmable devices and make a distinction between ASIC and FPGAs.HistoryThe initial ASICs used gate array technology
26、. Ferranti produced perhaps the first gate-array, the ULA (Uncommitted Logic Array), around 1980. Customization occurred by varying the metal interconnect mask. ULAs had complexities of up to a few thousand gates. Later versions became more generalized, with different base dies customized by both me
27、tal and polysilicon layers. Some base dies include RAM elements.Standard cell designIn the mid 1980s a designer would choose an ASIC manufacturer and implement their design using the design tools available from the manufacturer. While third party design tools were available, there was not an effecti
28、ve link from the third party design tools to the layout and actual semiconductor process performance characteristics of the various ASIC manufacturers.Most designers ended up using factory specific tools to complete the implementation of their designs. A solution to this problem that also yielded a
29、much higher density device was the implementation of Standard Cells. Every ASIC manufacturer could create functional blocks with known electrical characteristics, such as propagation delay, capacitance and inductance; that could also be represented in third party tools.Standard cell design is the ut
30、ilization of these functional blocks to achieve very high gate density and good electrical performance. Standard cell design fits between Gate Array and Full Custom design in terms of both its NRE (Non-Recurring Engineering) and recurring component cost.By the late 1980s, logic synthesis tools, such
31、 as Design Compiler, became available. Such tools could compile HDL descriptions into a gate-level netlist. This enabled a style of design called standard-cell design. Standard-cell Integrated Circuits (ICs) are designed in the following conceptual stages, although these stages overlap significantly
32、 in practice.These steps, implemented with a level of skill common in the industry, almost always produce a final device that correctly implements the original design, unless flaws are later introduced by the physical fabrication process.A team of design engineers starts with a non-formal understand
33、ing of the required functions for a new ASIC, usually derived from requirements analysis.*The design team constructs a description of an ASIC to achieve these goals using an HDL. This process is analogous to writing a computer program in a high-level language. This is usually called the RTL (register transfer level) design. *Suitability for purpos
