Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI)

Even elementary school students of today know that electronics can do fan­ tastic things. Electronic calculators make arithmetic easy. An electronic box connected to your TV set provides a wonderful array of games. Electronic boxes can translate languages! Electronics has even changed watches from a pair of hands to a set of digits. Integrated circuit (IC) chips, which use transistors to store information in binary form and perform binary arithmetic, make all of this possible. In just a short twenty years, the field of inte­ grated circuits has progressed from chips containing several transistors performing simple functions such as OR and AND functions to chips presently available which contain thousands of transistors performing a wide range of memory, control and arithmetic functions. In the late 1970's Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) caught the imagin­ ation of the industrialized world. The United States, Japan and other coun­ tries now have substantial efforts to push the frontier of microelectronics across the one-micrometer barrier and into sub-micrometer features. The achievement of this goal will have tremendous impl ications, both technolo­ gical and economic for the countries involved.