A closer look at the trade for VLSI aspirants

Some known product companies are Intel, Mediatek, Qualcomm, Samsung etc. They are responisble for designing the ASIC(Application specified integrated circuit)/SoC(System on chip).

The basic flow goes like this, hardware design and software, testing and validation of product and then finally deployment of product for the customer. As the market need grows and varies with passing time, these companies also keep innovating in parallel.

Product companies are of two types, EDA and Design.

EDA companies came into existence in 1981, prior to which IC were manually designed since software tools were not available in that time. Now what these companies do is build software that are used to build the ICs and PCBs. To combat the design complexity, superior software is required, in answer to which these come into picture.

1. Cadence Design System

2. Synposis

3. Mentor Siemens

4. Dorado Design Automation

5. Agnisys

Design companies have their own product in the market and work for full design cycle. Design Company target one application or more at the same time, they work from designing to implementation of hardware and software, testing and validation of design product. Few Design houses are Intel, Qualcomm, NXP, STMicroelectronics etc.