VLSI Physical Design Automation

Integrated Circuit (IC) has transformed our society into an information society. It impacts all walks of life and promises to be even more dominating with the arrival of information superhighway. This revolutionary development and widespread use of ICs has been one of the greatest achievements of the humankind. Since its inception in 1960’s, IC technology has evolved from in-tegration of a few transistors in Small Scale Integration (SSI) to integration of millions of transistors in Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) chips currently in use. Early IC’s only had a couple of gates or a flip-flop. Some IC’s were simply a single transistor along with a resistor network to perform a logic function. In a period of three and a half decades, there have been four generations of IC’s with the number of transistors on a single chip growing from a few to over 10 million. This rapid growth in integration technology has been made possible by automation of various steps involved in design and fabrication of VLSI chips.