Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Program
TheVery High Speed Integrated Circuit(VHSIC)Programwas aUnited States Department of Defense(DOD) research program that ran from 1980 to 1990.[1]Its mission was to research and develop very high-speedintegrated circuitsfor theUnited States Armed Forces.
Program
[edit]VHSIC was launched in 1980 as a joint tri-service (Army/Navy/Air Force) program. The program led to advances inintegrated circuitmaterials, lithography, packaging, testing, and algorithms, and created numerouscomputer-aided design(CAD) tools. A well-known part of the program's contribution isVHDL(VHSIC Hardware Description Language), ahardware description language(HDL). The program also redirected the military's interest inGaAsICs back toward the commercial mainstream ofCMOScircuits.[2][3]
More than $1 billion in total was spent for the VHSIC program for silicon integrated circuit technology development.[4]
ADARPAproject which ran concurrently, theVLSI Project,having begun two years earlier in 1978, contributedBSD Unix,theRISC processor,theMOSISresearch design fab, and greatly furthered theMead and Conway revolutionin VLSI design automation. By contrast, the VHSIC program was comparatively less cost-effective for the funds invested over a contemporaneous time frame, though the projects had different final objectives and are not entirely comparable for that reason.
By the time the program ended in 1990, commercial processors were far outperforming what the Pentagon's program had produced; however, it did manage to subsidize US semiconductor equipment manufacturing, stimulating an industry that shipped much of its product abroad (mainly to Asia).[5]
References
[edit]- ^Alic, John A.; Brooks, Harvey; Branscomb, Lewis M. (1992).Beyond Spinoff: Military and Commercial Technologies in a Changing World.Harvard Business School Press. pp. 269–270.
- ^David J. Creasey (1985).Advanced Signal Processing.IEE Telecommunications Series.ISBN0-86341-037-5.
- ^John B. Shoven (1988).Government Policy Towards Industry in the United States and Japan.Cambridge University Press.ISBN0-521-33325-3.
- ^U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment,Microelectronics Research and Development – A Background Paper,OTA-B P-C IT-40, pp. 21–22 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, March 1986).
- ^Bryen, Stephen (2022-08-25)."Russia's long-time chips failure coming home to roost".Asia Times.Retrieved2023-05-22.