Application-specific integrated circuit in the context of Metal–oxide–semiconductor

An image pipeline or video pipeline is the set of components commonly used between an image source (such as a camera, a scanner, or the rendering engine in a computer game), and an image renderer (such as a television set, a computer screen, a computer printer or cinema screen), or for performing any intermediate digital image processing consisting of two or more separate processing blocks. An image/video pipeline may be implemented as computer software, in a digital signal processor, on an FPGA, or as fixed-function ASIC. In addition, analog circuits can be used to do many of the same functions.

Typical components include image sensor corrections (including debayering or applying a Bayer filter), noise reduction, image scaling, gamma correction, image enhancement, colorspace conversion (between formats such as RGB, YUV or YCbCr), chroma subsampling, framerate conversion, image compression/video compression (such as JPEG), and computer data storage/data transmission.

Digital control is a branch of control theory that uses digital computers to act as system controllers.Depending on the requirements, a digital control system can take the form of a microcontroller to an ASIC to a standard desktop computer.Since a digital computer is a discrete system, the Laplace transform is replaced with the Z-transform. Since a digital computer has finite precision (See quantization), extra care is needed to ensure the error in coefficients, analog-to-digital conversion, digital-to-analog conversion, etc. are not producing undesired or unplanned effects.

Since the creation of the first digital computer in the early 1940s the price of digital computers has dropped considerably, which has made them key pieces to control systems because they are easy to configure and reconfigure through software, can scale to the limits of the memory or storage space without extra cost, parameters of the program can change with time (See adaptive control) and digital computers are much less prone to environmental conditions than capacitors, inductors, etc.

A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is a type of configurable integrated circuit that can be repeatedly programmed after manufacturing. FPGAs are a subset of logic devices referred to as programmable logic devices (PLDs). They consist of a grid-connected array of programmable logic blocks that can be configured "in the field" to interconnect with other logic blocks to perform various digital functions. FPGAs are often used in limited (low) quantity production of custom-made products, and in research and development, where the higher cost of individual FPGAs is not as important and where creating and manufacturing a custom circuit would not be feasible. Other applications for FPGAs include the telecommunications, automotive, aerospace, and industrial sectors, which benefit from their flexibility, high signal processing speed, and parallel processing abilities.

A FPGA configuration is generally written using a hardware description language (HDL) e.g. VHDL, similar to the ones used for application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). Circuit diagrams were formerly used to write the configuration.

Software rendering is the process of generating an image from a model by means of computer software. In the context of computer graphics rendering, software rendering refers to a rendering process that is not dependent upon graphics hardware ASICs, such as a graphics card. The rendering takes place entirely in the CPU. Rendering everything with the (general-purpose) CPU has the main advantage that it eliminates the need of a graphics card for rendering, but the disadvantage is that a CPU is not designed specifically for graphics rendering in the way a graphics card is which leads to slower rendering times.

Rendering is used in architecture, simulators, video games, movies and television visual effects and design visualization. Rendering is the last step in an animation process, and gives the final appearance to the models and animation with visual effects such as shading, texture-mapping, shadows, reflections and motion blur. Rendering can be split into two main categories: real-time rendering (also known as online rendering), and pre-rendering (also called offline rendering). Real-time rendering is used to interactively render a scene, like in 3D computer games, and generally each frame must be rendered in a few milliseconds. Offline rendering is used to create realistic images and movies, where each frame can take hours or days to complete, or for debugging of complex graphics code by programmers.

In computer engineering, a hardware description language (HDL) is a specialized computer language used to describe the structure and behavior of electronic circuits, usually to design application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and to program field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

A hardware description language enables a precise, formal description of an electronic circuit that allows for the automated analysis and simulation of the circuit. It also allows for the synthesis of an HDL description into a netlist (a specification of physical electronic components and how they are connected together), which can then be placed and routed to produce the set of masks used to create an integrated circuit.

The Western Design Center (WDC), located in Mesa, Arizona, is a company that develops intellectual property for, and licenses manufacture of, MOS Technology 65xx based microprocessors and microcontrollers. WDC was founded in 1978 by a former MOS Technology employee and co-holder of the MOS Technology 6502 patent, Bill Mensch. Prior to leaving MOS Technology in 1977 Bill was the microprocessor design manager at MOS Technology.

Beyond discrete devices, WDC offers device designs in the form of semiconductor intellectual property cores (IP cores) to use inside other chips such as application-specific integrated circuit (ASICs), and provides ASIC and embedded systems consulting services revolving around their processor designs. WDC also produces C compilers, assembler/linker packages, simulators, development–evaluation printed circuit boards, and in-circuit emulators for their processors.