What is the difficulty of chip design? 1/2

Chip is the core component of modern electronic products. Its role is same like the brain to human,which is very important. And now is the era of science and technology, machinery is gradually replacing labor, electronic products can be seen everywhere in our lives, indispensable. So as an electronic product "brain" chip is also bound to have a huge market, so why are the numbers of chips manufacturers still so limited? All this is because chip production is difficult and has a very high threshold.

Although the birth of EDA technology in the 1980s greatly reduced the difficulty of chip design and VLSI. But chip production itself has a dense technology content and a production line of tens of billions of dollars in capital to step into the field of chip production businesses can only be deterred.

The complete process of modern chip manufacturing is mainly chip design, wafer manufacturing, packaging, testing and other main steps, each of which is the embodiment of technology, but also a microcosm of a large amount of capital investment.

Today we will discuss the first difficulty in chip production, chip design. First, the production process of chip design has six steps: requirement definition, function realization, structure design, logic synthesis, physical realization and physical layout. The difficulty of requirement definition is combined with how to accurately refine and estimate market demand, and how to combine this demand with factory production capacity and technical personnel strength. The realization of function is difficult to meet the balance of the target and the upper limit of its own ability to the maximum extent. Structural design is difficult in how to improve the efficiency of module use and reduce module use. The difficulty of logic synthesis is not only to ensure the synthesis, clarity, simplicity and readability of the code, but also to ensure the reusability of the module. Finally, physical implementation and physical layout are difficult to reduce the use of components and connections, but at the same time do not affect the performance of the chip, so that its functions do not interfere with each other.

This is the first difficulty in chip production-chip design!