With the recent improvements in processing technology which have made available reliable CMOS and BiCMOS realizations of both digital and analogue circuit components on the same chip, there has been a large increase in the number of mixed-mode circuits manufactured. The details of the processes and design techniques have been described earlier in this book. The majority of the circuits being realized are designed for specific functions and are manufactured in relatively small quantities, and hence fall under the category of application specific integrated circuits (ASICs). The increase in access to the processing lines via the silicon broker system, with the resulting decrease in price, has widened the availability of these mixed mode ASICs to many more engineers, both in industry and academia. It is expected that this trend will increase in the coming years, with about a 3-fold increase in manufacture of these circuits predicted over the next five years.

Inspec keywords: integrated circuit testing; digital-analogue conversion; signal processing; BiCMOS digital integrated circuits; analogue-digital conversion; mixed analogue-digital integrated circuits; BiCMOS analogue integrated circuits

Other keywords: digital signal processing; mixed analogue-digital circuit testing; application specific integrated circuit; silicon broker system; A/D converter; D/A converter; BiCMOS

Subjects: Mixed analogue-digital circuits