Even elementary school students of today know that electronics can do fan tastic things. Electronic calculators make arithmetic easy. An electronic box connected to your TV set provides a wonderful array of games. Electronic boxes can translate languages! Electronics has even changed watches from a pair of hands to a set of digits. Integrated circuit (IC) chips, which use transistors to store information in binary form and perform binary arithmetic, make all of this possible. In just a short twenty years, the field of integrated circuits has progressed from chips containing several transistors performing simple functions such as OR and AND functions to chips presently available which contain thousands of transistors performing a wide range of memory, control and arithmetic functions. In the late 1970's Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) caught the imagin ation of the industrialized world. The United States, Japan and other countries now have substantial efforts to push the frontier of microelectronics across the one-micrometer barrier and into sub-micrometer features. The achievement of this goal will have tremendous impl ications, both technolo gical and economic for the countries involved.
