ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a general overview of the Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) design process and the reader with a qualitative understanding of the steps involved in the VLSI design process. The time will come when we want to discuss the process of designing sophisticated VLSI systems. In 1965, Gordon Moore made an observation and prediction on the development of semiconductor technology. The VLSI design methodology developed by Mead and Conway and others in the late 1970s released the integrated circuit (IC) designers from the details of semiconductor manufacturing, so they could concentrate their efforts on coping with the circuit functionality. The initial step in designing a circuit is usually to specify a behavioral representation of the circuit. A hardware description language is a programming language with a syntax specially designed to allow the description of circuits. In either case, the structural representation of the adder is a description of the building blocks needed to implement the selected structure.
