Digital Circuit Design Trends

This paper has described the different trends in the digital circuit design and changes over the past two decades moving from chips that contained tens of thousands of devices to today' s chips that may contain over a billion transistors. The job of the digital circuit designer has grown with the chips, moving from optimizing and validating gates, to working on functional units, to now designing complete systems. While the progress in digital design has clearly been tremendous, power challenges are an important issue in future VLSI designing system. Designers used considerable ingenuity to make CMOS compatible with the older bipolar ECL/TTL families, concentrating on meeting all aspects of the without requiring external components.