VLSI Design

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Deep Blue VLSI chip ¹

VLSI Design, (Very Large Scale Integration)
an integrated circuit design combining a very large number (typically several 100 thousands or millions) of MOS transistors onto a single chip ¹. Since the late 70s, until today, microprocessors and memory chips are VLSI chips. In 1978-1979, Caltech professor Carver Mead and scientist Lynn Conway ² wrote the textbook Introduction to VLSI Systems and taught simple design rules suited for electronic design automation starting the VLSI revolution. In 1980, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States began the DoD's new VLSI research project to support extensions of this work, which resulted in many university and industry researchers learning and improving the Mead-Conway innovations.

VLSI in Computer Chess

Inspired by the hardware move generator design of Belle and motivated by the Mead-Conway innovations, several universities researched on VLSI Design in computer chess. Most notable and successful was the Carnegie Mellon University headed by Hsiang-Tsung Kung along with Charles E. Leiserson, who introduced systolic arrays suited for VLSI design. The primary protagonists of the rival chess programs of HiTech and ChipTest, which later evolved to Deep Thought and Deep Blue, were Hans Berliner, Carl Ebeling and Andrew James Palay et al., versus Feng-hsiung Hsu, Thomas Anantharaman and Murray Campbell. A team around Jonathan Schaeffer worked at the University of Waterloo on VLSI chess chips ³. while James Testa and Alvin M. Despain from the University of California, Berkeley build the Berkeley Chess Microprocessor. At the University of Hamburg a team around Alexander Reinefeld and Dieter Steinwender build MicroMurks in 1981/82, a 68000 based system with own chips and VLSI layout ⁴.

See also

• Integrated Circuits
• FPGA

Selected Publications

1979

• Lynn Conway (1979). The MIT'78 VLSI System Design Course: A Guidebook for the Instructor of VLSI System Design. pdf
• Hsiang-Tsung Kung, Charles E. Leiserson (1979). Systolic arrays (for VLSI). Sparse Matrix Proceedings 1978 ⁵

1980 ...

• Carver Mead, Lynn Conway (1980). Introduction to VLSI systems. Addison-Wesley
• Charles E. Leiserson (1981). Area-Efficient VLSI Computation. Ph.D. thesis, Carnegie Mellon University, advisor Hsiang-Tsung Kung, pdf
• Uri Weiser, Al Davis (1981). A Wavefront Notation Tool for VLSI Array Design. in Hsiang-Tsung Kung, Bob Sproull, Guy Steele (eds.) (1981). VLSI Systems and Computations. Springer
• Gérard M. Baudet (1981). On the Area Required by VLSI Circuits. in Hsiang-Tsung Kung, Bob Sproull, Guy Steele (eds.) VLSI Systems and Computations. Springer
• Hsiang-Tsung Kung (1982). Why Systolic Architectures? IEEE Computer, Vol. 15, No. 1, pdf
• Greg Bakker, Jim Jonkman, Jonathan Schaeffer, Tom Schultz (1982). VLSI Implementation of a Chess Legal Move Generator. EE755S-1, University of Waterloo
• Jonathan Schaeffer, Patrick A.D. Powell, Jim Jonkman (1983). A VLSI legal move generator for the game of chess. in Randal E. Bryant (eds.) Third Caltech Conference on Very Large Scale Integration
• Gérard M. Baudet, Franco P. Preparata, Jean Vuillemin (1983). Area-Time Optimal VLSI Circuits for Convolution. IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol. 32, No 7
• Carl Ebeling, Andrew James Palay (1984). The Design and Implementation of a VLSI Chess Move Generator. Proceedings of the 11th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture. IEEE and ACM.
• Carl Ebeling (1986). All the Right Moves: A VLSI Architecture for Chess. Ph.D. thesis, Carnegie Mellon University, MIT Press ⁶
• Feng-hsiung Hsu (1986). Two designs of functional units for VLSI based chess machines. Carnegie Mellon University, Computer Science Department. Paper 1566.
• Feng-hsiung Hsu (1987). A Two-Million Moves/Sec CMOS Single-Chip Chess Move Generator. IEEE Journal of Solid-state Circuits, Vol. 22, No. 5
• Alan Sherman (1989). VLSI Placement and Routing: The PI Project. Springer

1990 ...

• Feng-hsiung Hsu, Thomas Anantharaman, Murray Campbell, Andreas Nowatzyk (1990). A Grandmaster Chess Machine. Scientific American, Vol. 263, No. 4
• James Testa, Alvin M. Despain (1990). [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumber=124744&contentType=Conference+Publications&searchWithin%3Dp_Authors%3A.QT.Testa%2C+J..QT. A CMOS VLSI chess microprocessor]. University of California, Berkeley, IEEE Custom Integrated Circuit Conference
• Simon Lucas, Robert I. Damper (1991). Syntactic neural networks in VLSI. VLSI for Artificial Intelligence and Neural Networks
• Feng-hsiung Hsu, Murray Campbell, Joe Hoane (1995). Deep Blue System Overview. International Conference on Supercomputing
• Feng-hsiung Hsu (1999). IBM’s Deep Blue Chess Grandmaster Chips. IEEE Micro, Vol. 19, No. 2, pdf

External Links

• Very Large Scale Integration from Wikipedia
• Mead & Conway revolution from Wikipedia
• VLSI Project from Wikipedia
• Systolic array from Wikipedia

References