VLSI Technology, Inc., was an American company that designed and manufactured custom and semi-custom integrated circuits (ICs). The company was based in Silicon Valley, with headquarters at 1109 McKay Drive in San Jose. Along with LSI Logic, VLSI Technology defined the leading edge of the application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) business, which accelerated the push of powerful embedded systems into affordable products.
A VLSI VL82C106 Super I/O chip
VLSI VY86C06020FC-2 ARM60 CPU chip
Application-specific integrated circuit
An application-specific integrated circuit is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficiency video codec. Application-specific standard product chips are intermediate between ASICs and industry standard integrated circuits like the 7400 series or the 4000 series. ASIC chips are typically fabricated using metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) technology, as MOS integrated circuit chips.
A tray of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chips
A packet processing ASIC inside an Ethernet switch
Microscope photograph of a gate-array ASIC showing the predefined logic cells and custom interconnections. This particular design uses less than 20% of available logic gates.
Microscope photograph of custom ASIC (486 chipset) showing gate-based design on top and custom circuitry on bottom