Introduction
An Integrated circuit (IC) customized for a particular use and not for general use is called an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). An example of this is a chip which is designed only to run a cell phone. Whereas there are 7400 series and 4000 series integrated circuits as logic building blocks which can be wired together and used in various applications. There are also application specific standard products (ASSPs) which are intermediate between ASICs and standard products.
Over the years, as feature sizes have shrunk and design tools improved over the years, the maximum complexity possible in an ASIC has grown from 5,000 gates to over 100 million. These days, 32-bit processors, memory blocks including ROM, RAM, EEPROM, Flash and other large building blocks are included in ASICs. These ASIC are often termed a System-on-a-chip (SoC). Hardware description language (HDL), such as Verilog or VHDL is used by the designers of digital ASICs to describe the functionality of ASICs.
Equivalent of 7400 series logic are the field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA), and also to a breadboard, containing programmable logic blocks and programmable interconnects that allow the same FPGA to be used in many different applications.
The Non-recurring engineering cost (the cost to set up the factory to produce a particular ASIC) can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.
FPGAs are included in the general term application specific integrated circuit, but ASICs are used by designers only for for non field programmable devices, so as to make a distinction between ASIC and FPGAs.
Different ASICs are:
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