What is ASIC Design?

As feature sizes have shrunk and design tools improved over the years, the maximum complexity (and hence functionality) possible in an ASIC has grown from 5,000 gates to over 100 million. Modern ASICs often include entire 32-bit processors, memory blocks including ROM, RAM, EEPROM, Flash and other large building blocks. Such an ASIC is often termed a SoC (System-on-a-chip). Designers of digital ASICs use a hardware description language (HDL), such as Verilog or VHDL, to describe the functionality of ASICs.