Bebop to the Boolean Boogie, 3rd Edition

Chapter 17. Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs)

Introducing ASICs

As its name might suggest, an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) is a device whose function is determined by design engineers to satisfy the requirements of a particular application.

In 1967, Fairchild Semiconductor introduced a device called the Micromosaic, which contained a few hundred transistors. The key feature of the Micromosaic was that the transistors were not initially connected together. Design engineers used a computer program to specify the function they wished the device to perform. This program determined the necessary interconnections required to link the transistors and generated the masks required to complete the device. Although relatively ...