Life Cycle Cost Model for Very High Speed Integrated Circuits.

The Very High Speed Integrated Circuit VHSIC technology program is forecast to have a profound impact on performance, reliability, and cost of future avionics systems. An important question is how do VHSIC design fabrication and support concepts impact life cycle cost LCC of a host system To answer this question, an insertion model representative of future avionics systems is selected and LCCs are obtained for various chip designs and layout configurations which implement this model. This thesis then examines five factors affecting VHSIC chips with respect to LCC of a digital synthetic aperture radar processor. These factors are 1 chip technology and design 2 fabrication yields 3 substrate type 4 the degree to which computer-aided-design CAD methods are used and 5 maintenance level. Of these factors, the greatest impact to LCC is chip fabrication yields. The least effect on LCC is the degree to which CAD methods are used. The remaining factors fall between these two. Originator-supplied keywords include semiconductors, microcircuits and ChipsElectronics.