Even elementary school students of today know that electronics can do
fan- tastic things. Electronic calculators make arithmetic easy. An
electronic box connected to your TV set provides a wonderful array of
games. Electronic boxes can translate languages! Electronics has even
changed watches from a pair of hands to a set of digits. Integrated
circuit (IC) chips, which use transistors to store information in binary
form and perform binary arithmetic, make all of this possible. In just a
short twenty years, the field of inte- grated circuits has progressed
from chips containing several transistors performing simple functions
such as OR and AND functions to chips presently available which contain
thousands of transistors performing a wide range of memory, control and
arithmetic functions. In the late 1970's Very Large Scale Integration
(VLSI) caught the imagin- ation of the industrialized world. The United
States, Japan and other coun- tries now have substantial efforts to push
the frontier of microelectronics across the one-micrometer barrier and
into sub-micrometer features. The achievement of this goal will have
tremendous impl ications, both technolo- gical and economic for the
countries involved.