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. 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 such as general purpose processors 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 directly in hardware as logic ASICs implementing the software as hardware logic gates. Doing the opposite is also possible. For example, in a bitcoin miner, video encoders and decoders, firewalls, DVD players, image/video processing in video switchers and cameras, AI and network routers, this can be used to increase computation speed or reduce product cost or cost per product operation by removing the abstraction provided by the ISA and microarchitecture of a general purpose processor, with the trade-off being reducing or eliminating the flexibility of software running on the chip, making major or all software updates impossible without creating a new chip tapeout as they are limited to one purpose or one specific operation. This technique is thus reserved for mass market, high performance applications, and applications of this technique such as NPUs and video codecs can be implemented in other processors such as hardware video acceleration and NPUs or tensor cores in general purpose processors. FPGAs can be used in place of low quantities of ASICs and are programmable.