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The VLSI Project was a
DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the A ...
-program initiated by Robert Kahn in 1978 that provided research funding to a wide variety of
university A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United Stat ...
-based teams in an effort to improve the
state of the art The state of the art (sometimes cutting edge or leading edge) refers to the highest level of general development, as of a device, technique, or scientific field achieved at a particular time. However, in some contexts it can also refer to a level ...
in
microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circ ...
design, then known as
Very Large Scale Integration Very large-scale integration (VLSI) is the process of creating an integrated circuit (IC) by combining millions or billions of MOS transistors onto a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when MOS integrated circuit (Metal Oxide Semiconductor) ...
(VLSI). The VLSI Project is one of the most influential research projects in modern computer history. Its offspring include
Berkeley Software Distribution The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Be ...
(BSD)
Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, ...
, the
reduced instruction set computer In computer engineering, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks. Compared to the instructions given to a complex instruction set comp ...
(RISC) processor concept, many
computer-aided design Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computers (or ) to aid in the creation, modification, analysis, or optimization of a design. This software is used to increase the productivity of the designer, improve the quality of design, improve co ...
(CAD) tools still in use today,
32-bit In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in 32- bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform large calculati ...
graphics
workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''workst ...
s,
fabless manufacturing Fabless manufacturing is the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing their fabrication (or ''fab'') to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry. These foundries are typically, but not exclu ...
and design houses, and its own
semiconductor fabrication plant In the microelectronics industry, a semiconductor fabrication plant (commonly called a fab; sometimes foundry) is a factory where devices such as integrated circuits are manufactured. Fabs require many expensive devices to function. Estimates ...
(fab), MOSIS, starting in 1981. A similar DARPA project partnering with industry, VHSIC had little or no impact. The VLSI Project was central in promoting the Mead and Conway revolution throughout industry.


Project


New design rules

In 1975, Carver Mead, Tom Everhart and
Ivan Sutherland Ivan Edward Sutherland (born May 16, 1938) is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer, widely regarded as a pioneer of computer graphics. His early work in computer graphics as well as his teaching with David C. Evans in that subject ...
of
Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...
wrote a report for ARPA on the topic of microelectronics. Over the previous few years, Mead had coined the term "
Moore's law Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empi ...
" to describe
Gordon Moore Gordon Earle Moore (born January 3, 1929) is an American businessman, engineer, and the co-founder and chairman emeritus of Intel Corporation. He is also the original proponent of Moore's law. As of March 2021, Moore's net worth is repor ...
's 1965 prediction for the growth rate of complexity, and in 1974,
Robert Dennard Robert Heath Dennard (born September 5, 1932) is an American electrical engineer and inventor. Biography Dennard was born in Terrell, Texas, U.S. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Southern Methodist University, ...
of IBM noted that the scale shrinking that formed the basis of Moore's law also affected the performance of the systems. These combined effects implied a massive increase in computing power was about to be unleashed on the industry. The report, published in 1976, suggested that ARPA fund development across a number of fields in order to deal with the complexity that was about to appear due to these "very-large-scale integrated circuits". Later that year, Sutherland wrote a letter to his brother Bert who was at that time working at
Xerox PARC PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...
. He suggested a joint effort between PARC and Caltech to begin studying these issues. Bert agreed to form a team, inviting
Lynn Conway Lynn Ann Conway (born January 2, 1938) is an American computer scientist, electrical engineer and transgender activist. She worked at IBM in the 1960s and invented generalized dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used in out-of-order ...
and Doug Fairbairn to join. Conway had previously worked at IBM on a supercomputer project known as
ACS-1 The ACS-1 and ACS-360 are two related supercomputers designed by IBM as part of the IBM ''Advanced Computing Systems'' project from 1961 to 1969. Although the designs were never finished and no models ever went into production, the project spawned ...
. After considering the notes from Mead, Conway realized that the rapid scaling of
CMOS Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS, pronounced "sea-moss", ) is a type of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) fabrication process that uses complementary and symmetrical pairs of p-type and n-type MOSF ...
being predicted would allow it to surpass the otherwise faster ECL systems used on larger systems as the feature sizes shrank and Dennard's speed predictions kicked in. It also implied that the entire ACS-1 mainframe would one day fit on a single chip. In 1976, Sutherland and Mead wrote an article in ''
Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it. In print since 1845, it ...
'' on the challenges presented by the new complexity. At the time, microprocessor design was plateauing at the 100,000
transistor upright=1.4, gate (G), body (B), source (S) and drain (D) terminals. The gate is separated from the body by an insulating layer (pink). A transistor is a semiconductor device used to Electronic amplifier, amplify or electronic switch, switch ...
level because the tools available to the designers were simply unable to deal with more complex designs.
16-bit 16-bit microcomputers are microcomputers that use 16-bit microprocessors. A 16-bit register can store 216 different values. The range of integer values that can be stored in 16 bits depends on the integer representation used. With the two ...
and 16/32-bit designs were coming to market, but beyond that seemed too difficult and expensive to contemplate. Mead and Conway felt that there was no theoretical problem impeding progress, simply a number of practical ones, and set about solving these in order to make much more complex designs possible. Simply put, the solution was to simplify, simplify, simplify, inventing new practical rules-of-thumb for designers and applying computers to the problems that were larger. This process was aided by the recent introduction of depletion mode NMOS logic, which greatly simplified the conceptual model of the active elements. The mid-1970s were a period of rapid change as new processes were being introduced at different companies at a rapid pace. Each new process led to a set of design rules that often ran to 40 pages. These would include details like "do not place to parallel lines on the metallization layer (MET) that are closer than 2 micrometers apart". Dozens of such rules were developed for each layer to squeeze out maximum performance. In early 1977, Conway began developing a new set of completely generic rules. These would not offer the highest performance possible for any given system, but her concept was that it would so greatly reduce design time that it could be adapted to a new underling fabrication technology with little or no changes, and such a move would offer many times the performance benefit that using every published trick of the existing rules would. Starting with three colored whiteboard pens representing each of the types of layers, MET, POLY, DIFF, Conway developed a set of design rules that worked on every current process. Further development led to the realization that all of the dimensions could be expressed as multiples of some fundamental minimum feature size possible using that process, which became known as λ (the Greek letter lambda). λ was set to be one half of the minimum width of a line of POLY or DIFF, and the rules expressed in those terms; "a line has to be two λ wide", "two lines on the same layer must be at least three λ apart", "lines on different layers must be one λ apart" and so forth. The end result was a short set of design rules that applied at any scale. Conway later noted "I vividly recall seeing Mead's jaw drop that spring morning in 1977 as I presented my strategy for λ-based rules on my whiteboard at PARC."


Internet based process

One of the primary efforts under VLSI was the creation of the hardware and software needed to automate the design process, which at that point was still largely manual. For a design containing hundreds of thousands of transistors, there was simply no machine short of a
supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructio ...
that had the memory and performance needed to work on the design as a whole. To address this problem, and thereby allow "average" companies to use automated tools, VLSI funded the Geometry Engine and Pixel-Planes projects at
Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...
and
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United State ...
(respectively) to create suitable graphics hardware at the desktop level. The former evolved into an effort to design a networked CAD workstation, known as the Stanford University Network. This is better known today under its
acronym An acronym is a word or name formed from the initial components of a longer name or phrase. Acronyms are usually formed from the initial letters of words, as in ''NATO'' (''North Atlantic Treaty Organization''), but sometimes use syllables, as ...
, "SUN", as in
Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, t ...
, which commercialized the design. To provide a common ''software'' platform to run these new tools, VLSI also funded a Berkeley project to provide a standardized
Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, ...
implementation, known today as the
Berkeley Software Distribution The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Be ...
(BSD). Almost all early workstations used BSD, including designs that evolved into Sun, SGI,
Apollo Computer Apollo Computer Inc., founded in 1980 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, by William Poduska (a founder of Prime Computer) and others, developed and produced Apollo/Domain workstations in the 1980s. Along with Symbolics and Sun Microsystems, Apollo ...
, and others. BSD later spawned several descendants,
OpenBSD OpenBSD is a security-focused, free and open-source, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by forking NetBSD 1.0. According to the website, the OpenBSD project e ...
,
FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...
,
NetBSD NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was forked. It continues to be actively developed and is ava ...
, and DragonFlyBSD. CAD software was an important part of the VLSI effort. This led to major improvements in CAD technology for layout, design rule checking, and simulation. The tools developed in this program were used extensively in both academic research programs and in industry. The ideas were developed in commercial implementations by companies such as VLSI Technology, Cadnetix, and Synopsis. With these tools in hand, other VLSI funded projects were able to make huge strides in design complexity, sparking off the RISC revolution. The two major VLSI-related projects were Berkeley RISC and
Stanford MIPS MIPS, an acronym for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages, was a research project conducted by John L. Hennessy at Stanford University between 1981 and 1984. MIPS investigated a type of instruction set architecture (ISA) now calle ...
, both of which relied heavily on the tools developed in previous VLSI projects. To allow design teams to produce test examples, the project also funded the building of their own fabrication facility, MOSIS (''Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation Service''), which received plans electronically. MOSIS remains in operation today. Another important part of the MOSIS fabrication process was the development of the multichip wafer, which allowed a single wafer of silicon to be used to produce several chip designs at the same time. Previously a wafer would normally be used to produce a single design, which meant that there was a definite minimum production run one could consider starting up. In contrast, the multichip wafer a small batch of a chip design could be produced in the middle of a larger run, dramatically lowering the startup cost and prototyping stage.


Investigators

* David Patterson, Berkeley_RISC RISC I and II *
John L. Hennessy John Leroy Hennessy (born September 22, 1952) is an American computer scientist, academician and businessman who serves as Chairman of Alphabet Inc. Hennessy is one of the founders of MIPS Computer Systems Inc. as well as Atheros and served as ...
,
MIPS architecture MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipelined Stages) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures (ISA)Price, Charles (September 1995). ''MIPS IV Instruction Set'' (Revision 3.2), MIPS Technologies, ...
*
Danny Hillis William Daniel "Danny" Hillis (born September 25, 1956) is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and computer scientist, who pioneered parallel computers and their use in artificial intelligence. He founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a parall ...
,
Connection Machine A Connection Machine (CM) is a member of a series of massively parallel supercomputers that grew out of doctoral research on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computers by Danny Hillis at Massachusetts Institute of Techno ...
* Charles Seitz,
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*
H. T. Kung Hsiang-Tsung Kung (; born November 9, 1945) is a Taiwanese-born American computer scientist. He is the William H. Gates professor of computer science at Harvard University. His early research in parallel computing produced the systolic array ...
,
WARP Warp, warped or warping may refer to: Arts and entertainment Books and comics * WaRP Graphics, an alternative comics publisher * ''Warp'' (First Comics), comic book series published by First Comics based on the play ''Warp!'' * Warp (comics), a ...
*
Jim Clark James Clark Jr. OBE (4 March 1936 – 7 April 1968) was a British Formula One racing driver from Scotland, who won two World Championships, in 1963 and 1965. A versatile driver, he competed in sports cars, touring cars and in the Indianap ...
,
Geometry Engine Geometric manipulation of modelling primitives, such as that performed by a geometry pipeline, is the first stage in computer graphics systems which perform image generation based on geometric models. While geometry pipelines were originally imple ...
*
Forest Baskett Forest Baskett (born May 11, 1943) is an American venture capitalist, computer scientist and former professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. He is a venture capitalist at New Enterprise Associates. Baskett designed the operat ...
, SUN networking * John Ousterhout, Caesar and Magic design tools


Direct outcomes of the VLSI Project

* Sun-1 was an offshoot of the Stanford SUN workstation project *
Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and soft ...
's workstation design was based on the Geometry Engine concept *UNC's Pixel-Planes, PixelFlow and WarpEngine series of
parallel processor Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different for ...
graphics
workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''workst ...
s * Berkeley RISC turned into
SPARC SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system develope ...
at
Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, t ...
*
Stanford MIPS MIPS, an acronym for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages, was a research project conducted by John L. Hennessy at Stanford University between 1981 and 1984. MIPS investigated a type of instruction set architecture (ISA) now calle ...
are used in many embedded applications such as
set-top box A set-top box (STB), also colloquially known as a cable box and historically television decoder, is an information appliance device that generally contains a TV-tuner input and displays output to a television set and an external source of s ...
es *
BSD Unix The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berke ...
and its derivatives remain a popular system


References


Bibliography

*


External links

* *{{cite journal , first=James , last=Clark , title=The Geometry Engine: A VLSI Geometry System for Graphics , journal=Computer Graphics , volume=16 , issue=3 , date=July 1982 , pages=127–133 , url=https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/965145.801272 , citeseerx=10.1.1.359.8519 , doi=10.1145/965145.801272, s2cid=10223583
The Pixel-Planes Group
DARPA History of computing Integrated circuits