Chip Challenge

摘要

Back in 1981, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli took me and two other graduate students to Harris Semiconductor, in Melbourne, Florida, as part of his sabbatical leave from the University of California, Berkeley. Harris was at that time a major provider of analog and digital semiconductors, and the management was farsighted in looking at avenues to design more, better, and cheaper integrated circuits (ICs). It is important to plunge back for a moment into the eighties to remember what design was: largescale schematics drawn by hand and then entered into computing systems and medium-scale handdrawn layouts painfully captured by “Calma operators” in specialized “design rooms” (see Figure 1). Most computer-aided design (CAD) at the time was related to simulating and optimizing transistor-level schematics. This important activity was already mature at that time: robust mathematical methods and efficient algorithms were implemented in computer programs such as SPICE and its derivatives.