Integrated circuit design

Integrated circuit design, semiconductor design, chip design or IC design, is a sub-field of electronics engineering, encompassing the particular logic and circuit design techniques required to design integrated circuits (ICs). An IC consists of miniaturized electronic components built into an electrical network on a monolithic semiconductor substrate by photolithography.

IC design can be divided into the broad categories of digital and analog IC design. Digital IC design is to produce components such as microprocessors, FPGAs, memories (RAM, ROM, and flash) and digital ASICs. Computer processors are digital logic chips. Digital design focuses on logical correctness, maximizing circuit density, and placing circuits so that clock and timing signals are routed efficiently. Analog IC design also has specializations in power IC design and RF IC design. Analog IC design is used in the design of op-amps, linear regulators, phase locked loops, oscillators and active filters. Analog design is more concerned with the physics of the semiconductor devices, such as gain, matching, power dissipation, and resistance. Fidelity of analog signal amplification and filtering is usually critical, and as a result, analog ICs use larger area active devices than digital designs and are usually less dense in circuitry.

Modern ICs are enormously complicated. An average desktop computer chip, as of 2026, has over 20 billion transistors. The rules for what can and cannot be manufactured are also extremely complex. Common IC processes of 2015 have more than 500 rules. Furthermore, since the manufacturing process itself is not completely predictable, designers must account for its statistical nature. The complexity of modern IC design, as well as market pressure to produce designs rapidly, has led to the extensive use of tools in the IC design process, known as electronic design automation (EDA) tools. The design of some processors has become complicated enough to be difficult to fully test, and this has caused problems at large cloud providers. In short, designing an IC using EDA software consists of designing, testing, and verifying the instructions that the IC will carry out. Since logic chips are implemented out of logic gates, in theory, many software programs that run on general purpose processors such as CPUs or GPGPUs can be implemented as ASICs, and vice versa. For example, in a bitcoin miner, video codecs, firewalls, DVD players, image/video processing in video switchers and cameras, and AI this can be used to increase computation speed or reduce cost per operation, with the trade-off being reduced or eliminating the flexibility of software and making updates impossible without creating a new chip tapeout as they are limited to one purpose or one specific operation. FPGAs can be used in place of low quantities of ASICs.