Design methodology and performance estimation for complementary gallium arsenide

The trend towards VLSI digital signal and image processors for interactive mobile multimedia (M/sup 3/C) communications imposes a very high level of performance requirements for the underlying technology. Portability of the system imposes further complexity in terms of the need for low voltage operation and low power dissipation. This paper will address a new area of basic research, that exploits the parallelism and connectivity offered by optics together with the compactness and functionality available from VLSI using complementary gallium arsenide as the base technology for image capture, on-line compression and display. A device architecture in the form of intelligent pixels using a newly developed methodology for design and layout of complementary gallium arsenide is also presented.