A narrative history and description of MOSIS software

This article explores the major software systems used by MOSIS since its inception in 1980, developed by the author. The MOSIS project (Metal Oxide Silicon Implementation System) has served the nation by turning VLSI (microchip) designs, submitted over email, into fully packaged chips, sent back to the user via US mail. Before MOSIS, chip designers were faced with a prohibitive fabrication expense, and the daunting tasks of augmenting their designs with various tedious geometries and coordinating the various vendors ranging from mask making for the fabrication of silicon to packaging. The major innovation has been the "sharing of silicon". The various "packers" that implement silicon sharing are explored, as well as the other requisite software. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.