Education today is all about innovation. Though there are a plethora of training institutes the best VLSI training institute should have the most exemplary combination of expert guidance, practical skills development, well-equipped laboratories, and real-world practice modules. But before choosing a training institute lets understand why VLSI is so much in demand.
Long gone are the days when it used to take an entire room to fit a computer. Now the computers are smaller, faster, and cheaper and power efficient. This is because formerly bigger bulkier computers had vacuum tubes which are now replaced by modern machines with integrated chips.
An invention of integrated chips has changed the entire scene of computer building, and now more and more transistors are being placed on a chip. This exponential development of integrated chips is now a fully fledged field of study and research.
Very large scale integration
It all began in the 1970s when semiconductor and communication were still in its nascent stage. VLSI is the process by which an integrated chip can be created with thousands of transistors placed on a single chip. This integrated chip has CPU, RAM, ROM, and many other components.
VLSI designing comprises of the back end and front end designing. Back end designing involves CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) designing, physical designing and fault simulation. Front end designing involves digital designing, design verification and designing testability.
The pipeline of VLSI designing
- Problem specification keeping in mind size, speed, performance, the functionality of the VLSI system and the market requirements.
- Architecture designing like deciding the floating point units, size of the cache file and which system should be used.
- Functional designing involves making block diagram while identifying the interconnection requirements and internal structuring.
- Logic designing involves developing Boolean expression, register allocation, control flow, word width etc. Gate minimization is done to find the most effective logic implementation.
- Circuit designing involves creating a netlist which puts transistors, gates and interconnects in place.
- Physical designing is achieved by geometrical representation of the netlist which involves circuit partitioning, floor planning, routing, layout compaction, and extraction and verification.
- The final stage is of packaging which involves putting the chip together with all its components on a printed circuit board.
From above it is pretty clear that all these steps require extensive VLSI design training which can impart the best in quality practical skills and knowledge to an engineer.
Why choose VLSI designing?
Today many experienced engineers, as well as aspiring ones, want to learn VLSI designing and the sole reason is the ubiquitous nature of integrated chips. As one can see that nearly 10000 million transistors can be fabricated on a single chip which leads to many advantages like:
- Reduced circuit size.
- Higher reliability.
- Cost-effective
- Higher operating speed.
- Less power consumption.
- Occupies very small space.
And all these advantages have to lead to hundreds of application of IC in the tech market. Some of the uses are:
- Computers.
- Medicines.
- Digital signaling process.
- Automobiles.
- Consumer appliances like cell phones, cameras etc.
- Artificial intelligence.
VLSI has come a long way from the era when the chips were hand designed. This field is still growing and will show major transformations in coming years, that is the sole reason why the career opportunities it will also soar. There are a plethora of options to choose from, but the most important things are that the institute should enhance ones practical skills under expert guidance and supervision.
