A brief History of mixed Circuit and Module Technology(1)

Integration

During the period covered in this article, ASIC technology brought about a revolution in the industry. At first, hundreds of gate arrays provided the military with a way to improve digital integration, and with the rapid increase in gate density and the improvement of development tools. The days of hybrid circuits seemed numbered. In -20s, military equipment designers realized the success of digital ASIC and tried to apply the same method for mixed-signal circuits. Their motivation was dominated by the need for miniaturization, because the military needed increasingly complex systems that had a large budget. However, difficulty and complexity of tailoring fully customized design tools for customers and the complexity of simulation design means that, in the case of a design that is actually fully customized. Mixed signal ASIC will still be very resource-intensive and highly dependent on the design team of semiconductor manufacturers. Although great progress has been made in analog ASIC design tools and technologies, the real world simulation problems are so wide that it is still difficult to solve them one by one with ready-made semi-custom circuits. Therefore, when off-the-shelf products do not work, hybrid circuits provide a way to integrate various high-performance analog and signal link functions made with different process technologies into a single package.