A Brief History of VLSI Technology

VLSI Technology was founded in 1981 by Dan Floyd, Jack Baletto and Gunnar Wetlesen who had worked together at Signetics. The initial investments were by Hambrecht and Quist, a cross between a VC and a bank, and by Evans and Sutherland, the simulation/graphics company.

The fourth person to join the company was Doug Fairbairn. He was still at Xerox PARC but went to interview the three founders for Lambda Magazine that he was just getting off the ground. He immediately realized that their plans for a foundry wouldn’t really work without a new generation of design automation tools because the EDA tools of that era were polygon-based layout editors but semiconductor technology was already past the point where you could reasonably design everything by hand.

In the early days of VLSI, the company was sustained by designing ROMs for the first generation of video game consoles, which were all cartridge-based. Each cartridge actually contained a ROM with the video-game binary programmed into it. The fab in San Jose was not yet up and running, and so these were actually outsourced to Rohm in Osaka Japan. In parallel, Doug hired a bunch of PhDs, many from Carver Mead’s Silicon Structures Project at CalTech, and the profits from video games were invested in a suite of tools for what we would now call ASIC design, although that name didn’t come until later.

















An early project, called Bagpipe, was to design a chip for the not-yet-announced Apple Macintosh. This chip had more sound channels and better graphics than the Mac eventually had, but Steve Jobs canceled the project in 1982 since he worried that finishing it might make the Mac late, which is actually laughable in retrospect since the Mac came out in 1984 at least a year later than planned in any case.

VLSI had a fab on McKay Drive in San Jose. At the time, it was the only high tech building there, surrounded by greenhouses growing flowers and, across the street was the Chrysanthemum Growers Association Hall that was sometimes used for company-wide meetings. The first process brought up was 3um HMOS, followed by 2um CMOS and 1.5um CMOS.

Fairly early on the investors decided that the company’s management team was too inexperienced to manage the anticipated growth. Al Stein was brought in as CEO. The company went public in February 1983, still not yet profitable, and almost immediately afterwards the 3 original founders departed.

The initial design technology, still based largely on the Caltech/PARC ideas in Mead and Conway’s seminal book Introduction to VLSI Design, was a mixture of manual design with generators for basic structures such as registers and adders using an internal language called VIP. The focus of the tools was on verification with a DRC, circuit extractor, LVS (called netcompare), simulators (VSIM, with no timing and then TSIM which had timing based on a simple capacitative model).

However, designs were getting too large for this approach and despite the inelegance compares to Mead and Conway’s ideas, it was clear that layout had to be much more automated. So standard cell libraries and a full place & route system were developed along with schematic capture to input the design.

In order to be successful, design had to get closer to the customer. Initially this meant that the customer came to VLSI and there were several teams working on site at VLSI’s San Jose buildings. For example, the main chip in France Telecom’s initial implementation of Minitel was created by Telic (now buried somewhere in Alcatel-Lucent) who sent a team of engineers from Strasbourgh to San Jose for several months.

The next step was to create a network of Design Centers (DCs) initially in the US, and then also in Japan and Europe, since it was clearly not scalable to bring all the customers on-site to California.
The IBM PC was now in its high growth phase and many customers of VLSI were designing products for that market (modems, add-in peripheral cards) or designing chips to create PC clones. In fact there were dozens of companies working with VLSI with a business strategy of being a large percentage of the PC industry, obviously an impossibility for all of them to succeed. To serve this market, VLSI developed the first of what today is called semiconductor IP although VLSI called them megacells (and later functional system blocks or FSBs). These included all the standard components in a PC such as the UARTs or the 6845 graphics controller.

Dan Yoder, as an experiment over a weekend, put all of these megacells together onto a few chips and created the first PC chipset, a chipset that could be used to create a full PC along with the Intel microprocessor and memory. VLSI ran with the idea and built up a large business in PC chipset standard products to go with its mainline ASIC business. One generation of chipsets was even resold by Intel.

Two key EDA products in the late 1980s were the datapath compiler and the state-machine compiler, effectively one of the first synthesis tools. The datapath compiler could take a complex description for a datapath and quickly generate a fully laid out datapath on silicon, using its own optimized custom library, not standard cells. And the state-machine compiler could take a description of a state-machine (or just any old logic) and produce an optimized implementation in standard cells. Together these two tools made creating complex designs much easier.

VLSI Industry Offers Mostly Verification Based Jobs

Today, VLSI devices are found everywhere around us. We find advanced VLSI chips in our cars, cell phones, household appliances, cameras, medical devices and many other places. This rapidly evolving sector offers exciting opportunities for those with strong fundamentals in electronic circuit design and hardware description languages, interest in VLSI design and verification and, more importantly, the skill to put know-how of VLSI concepts to practice.

With the advances being made in technologies like process geometries, feature and product innovations on a daily basis, there is a constant need to design, develop and re-engineer integrated circuits (ICs). Since products like mobile phones are being released with new features in increasingly shorter cycles, there is a healthy demand for qualified very large scale integration (VLSI) engineers to work on these products. Therefore there is good scope for a career in the VLSI industry.

The VLSI field offers exciting growth opportunities for engineers who are strong in electronic design fundamentals, have an interest in VLSI design and verification and know how to apply VLSI concepts to practice. Harish Mysore, director, India operations, Global IEEE Institute for Engineers Private Limited, informs, “In the VLSI chip design and verification alone, 20,000 to 30,000 engineers are currently employed with over 200,000 engineers working in the broader semiconductor industry, including embedded systems development and board-level hardware design.”

According to Vivek Madhukar, COO, TimesJobs.com, VLSI professionals are always in high demand in the fast-changing chip designing industry. There are over 150 companies catering to this industry, including big names like Texas Instruments, Infineon, Freescale Semiconductor, Cadence, HCL, Intel, Lucent, Motorola, Philips Semiconductor, Qualcomm, Sasken, Conexant, Wipro and TCS, to name a few. He says, “A career in one of these companies is highly sought after and developing VLSI skills is a good way to make this dream a reality.”

It is not easy to get into design
On the flip side, scope for a career in the design side of VLSI industry is currently somewhat limited as compared to other areas, feels Subhajit Sen, associate professor, International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, for three particular reasons. One, VLSI or chip design requires a deeper level of knowledge and skills than other electronics related fields. Two, VLSI chip design is expensive and requires access to high- cost, specialised electronic design automation (EDA) tools. Last, VLSI fabrication/prototyping is expensive and there is no commercial VLSI semiconductor manufacturing facility (foundry) in India.
K. Srinivasa Raju, CEO, Unistring Tech Solutions Pvt Ltd, informs that there are very few openings for jobs in analogue designing in the VLSI industry. He says, “The expectations in terms of the know-how of analogue complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) designs/issues are very high, which makes it difficult to get into analogue based VLSI companies. Most of the companies prefer to take M.Techs from only reputed institutes such as NITs/IITs.”
However, Sen believes, as India expands its electronics system design and manufacturing (ESDM) capabilities, the number of job opportunities is expected to grow in the VLSI design area.

Mostly verification based jobs in India 
Jobs in this industry are broadly distributed in four areas: FPGA based embedded system design, embedded based small FPGA application development, application specific integrated circuits (ASIC) based designs and VLSI verification for FPGAs/ASICs/embedded based designs.

“Most of the jobs in the VLSI industry in India are verification based, particularly for ASIC designs,” informs Raju. To get into such companies, one must be good in SystemVerilog and unified verification methodology (UVM) or open verification methodology (OVM).” He adds, “Most of these verification based companies prefer M.Tech graduates specialised in VLSI design.”

Good opportunities for fresh graduates

There are many career opportunities in the VLSI industry today, especially at the entry-level roles targeted at fresh engineering graduates. “One needs to understand that VLSI, as seen from textbooks, is not just limited to that. Skills such as digital domain and VHDL/Verilog HDL languages can be acquired that are used in FPGA based embedded system industry and also in ASIC companies,” says Raju.
Excellent fundamentals in digital electronics, topped with knowledge in either VHDL or Verilog HDL, can easily get an engineer a job in FPGA based companies. Especially for an M.Tech graduate in VLSI, at entry level it is highly possible to get an opportunity to work at the design level in the VLSI industry.
 
Embedded system design companies that develop FPGA based embedded applications also have openings for fresh graduates. Raju notes, “At the entry level, as fresh undergraduates (B.Tech/B.E.), it is comparatively easier to get into FPGA based embedded system companies than ASIC-VHDL/Verilog HDL based companies.” 

This field offers fresh engineering graduates opportunities in several stages of the VLSI chip design process too. “The biggest opportunities continue to be in the front-end register transfer level (RTL) design and verification with growing opportunities in logic synthesis and timing analysis, design for testability, physical design and verification, analogue and mixed signal CMOS IC design, CAD tools development, and hardware verification and validation,” according to Mysore.
Fresh graduates also have opportunities in field application engineering, technical support, and marketing and sales.
Although VLSI companies typically hire at M.Tech levels for VLSI design positions, candidates with good fundamentals in electronics, electrical or computer science engineering can find positions in areas such as testing and debugging of VLSI chips, informs Sen. He says, “Embedded software, which involves writing code for microcontrollers/processors embedded within VLSI chips, is also an active area of recruitment.”
“At our company, we recruit fresher graduates for working in the VLSI domain, provided they are good at the fundamentals of digital logic design (also referred to as digital electronics/switching theory and logic design), digital system design and have done their project implementation in either VHDL/Verilog HDL. We also give internships to M.Tech (in VLSI) students for their second year project work. For internships, we conduct written exams, technical and HR interviews,” shares Raju. He adds, “Currently, our team comprises more than ten engineers working in the field of VLSI. We are planning to recruit ten more for this year. Our recruitment procedure is always in internship mode.”

Pay package and demand areas
“During internship, we pay a stipend of anywhere between ` 4000 and ` 8000 per month, depending on the performance in the internship recruitment procedure. After completion of the internship/project-work, we offer the candidate a job in our company. The salary emolument is typically around Rs 144,000 to Rs 300,000 annually, depending on individual capabilities in technology,” informs Raju. Although, he maintains, MNCs pay double the amount of what they offer at Unistring.

“The silicon valley of India, Bengaluru, accounts for a majority of the jobs, as most companies have their core technology centres based there, with Hyderabad, Delhi, Chennai and Pune accounting for other opportunities in the VLSI sector,” informs Madhukar.
As a skill, chip designers form the cornerstone for electrical and computer engineering domains, and graduates from good institutes can command handsome starting salaries. As per figures provided by TimesJobs.com, 55 per cent of the engineers (basically feeshers) working in the VLSI domain are paid anywhere between Rs 120,000 and Rs 300,000 per annum. Twenty three per cent engineers draw anywhere between Rs 400,000 and Rs 700,000 per annum and 13 per cent of the (senior) engineers in this industry are paid nearly Rs 1 million and above.


In the near future
The VLSI industry is expected to grow rapidly in the next few years due to further reduction in geometry, reduced power requirements and very large-scale application-specific integrated circuits. As a result, continuous investments will be made by integrated device manufacturers in the semiconductor industry, in addition to the various steps taken by the Indian government to boost indigenous production of electronics in India to address rapid growth in the local demand for electronics. “Further, as a result of the increasing use of electronics in telecom, healthcare, automotive, industrial and office automation, and consumer goods, the need for advanced chip design and verification engineers in the semiconductor industry will further increase,” notes Mysore.

Career in VLSI/ Chip Designing - options and opportunities

Introduction VLSI, 'Very Large Scale Integration' is all about Integrated Circuit (IC) design. In other words it is called Chip design. Integrated circuit design is a subset of electrical engineering and computer engineering, consisting the particular logic and circuit design techniques required to design integrated circuits. Chip Designers are engineers who define chip’s architecture, create circuit designs, run simulations, supervise layout, tape out the chip to the foundry and evaluate the prototype once the chip returns from the laboratory. This field is suitable for those students who to do something more challenging and creative. Students with electronic background with good programming skills, strong mathematics and analytical skills are well suited for this career. Today, the two most popular languages used for chip designing are Verilog and VHDL. Nowadays, we have also become dependant on these chips as they are present in most of the electronic appliances which we use everyday, from mobiles, remote of TV to dishwashers and so on. This has increased the demand of chip designers in every sector, be it automobiles, consumer electronics etc. Performance and growth of industry in India At present, India is showing a huge potential in the market and its chip industry is growing at a rate of 20 per cent annually. There are over 160 Chip design firms in India. The immense pool of talent and growing domestic market has helped the country emerge as an important centre for chip design. The increasing demand for consumer electronic items has increased various career opportunities in chip design industry. Demand of Chip Designers is in excess compared to their supply. All the NITs and IITs totally produce only one fourth of the demand annually. To address the shortage of engineers possessing the right skills, the Indian government has set up a special manpower development programme (SMDP) in this area and spent a huge amount to introduce VLSI in institutes like NITs and IITs. Options and Opportunities In this industry the main job functions of a Chip Designer are Designing, Testing, Applications, Production and Process Engineering. The job options available to the engineers in this field are Design Engineer, CAD Engineer, Packaging Engineer, Product Engineer, Applications/Systems engineer, Test Engineer, Process Engineer. A chip design engineer's job ranges right from the architecture, logic design, circuit design and physical design of the chip to the testing and verification of the final product. Depending on the experience of the candidate in the industry his role could range from a technical individual to a technical leader to an engineering manager. Some of the major recruitment companies are HCL Technologies, Intel, Micron Tech, Alliance Semiconductor, Texas Instruments, Wipro, Synopsis, Cadence etc. Courses Available The IITs, NITs and many other universities offer various courses with high quality education in VLSI or Chip Designing. - M.E /M.Tech in VLSI Design - M.E /M.Tech in Embedded Systems Technologies - M.Tech in Embedded Systems and Design - M.Tech in Microelectronics and VLSI Design - Post Graduate Diploma in VLSI and Embedded Systems - Post Graduate Diploma in VLSI Design through Correspondence/Distance learning. - Diploma in VLSI Designing - Diploma in Embedded Systems Design Qualification required - Students can take admission in theses courses after passing 10+2 with at least 60% aggregate marks from any recognised board. - In order to pursue Master’s degree a candidate should have at least Bachelor’s degree (B.E/B.Tech) in electronics, telecommunications or computer science with high score in GATE. Some good institutes - Anna University: College of Engineering, Chennai, Tamil Nadu - Shri Vaishnav Institute of Technology and Science, Indore, MP - Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Goa - JB Institute of Engineering and Technology, AP - VEDA IIT, Hydrerabad - BITS, Pilani, - Punjab University - Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, Hydrerabad, AP - DOEACC Centre, Kerala - Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, West Bengal - International Institute of Information Technology, School of Information Technology, Pune, Maharashtra - National Institute of Technology, Kerala - Manipal Centre of Information Science - Bharath Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, Tamil Nadu - Bharati Vidyapeeths College of Engineering, Pune, Maharashtra - Annamalai University Directorate of Distance Education, Tamil Nadu Regards, VLSI Engi Tech Pvt. Ltd.