VHSIC was a 1980s U.S. government program to develop very-high-speed integrated circuits.

The United States Department of Defense

United States Department of Defense

The United States Department of Defense is the U.S...

 launched the VHSIC project in 1980 as a joint tri-service (Army/Navy/Air Force) project. The project led to advances in integrated circuit

Integrated circuit

An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is an electronic circuit manufactured by the patterned diffusion of trace elements into the surface of a thin substrate of semiconductor material...

 materials, lithography, packaging, testing, and algorithms, and created numerous computer-aided design

Computer-aided design

Computer-aided design , also known as computer-aided design and drafting , is the use of computer technology for the process of design and design-documentation. Computer Aided Drafting describes the process of drafting with a computer...

 tools. A well-known part of the project's contribution is VHDL, a hardware description language. The program also redirected the military's interest in GaAs

Gaas

Gaas is a commune in the Landes department in Aquitaine in south-western France....

 ICs back toward the commercial mainstream of CMOS

CMOS

Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor is a technology for constructing integrated circuits. CMOS technology is used in microprocessors, microcontrollers, static RAM, and other digital logic circuits...

circuits.