IC Design primitive components available in typical semiconductor processes

When an engineer is in the process of designing a board level product, he or she instinctively starts a search for off the shelf components that are required to implement the architecture that the engineer has chosen to satisfy the requirements of the product. Yet in some cases a particular function in the architecture cannot be realized using an off - the - shelf component. At this point the engineer may decide that he/she needs a custom part, sometimes an ASIC. The question is what kinds of typical primitive devices can a semiconductor process provide so that the required ASIC can be implemented. A reasonable list of such components is given in http://www.signalpro.biz/asictools.html for the interested reader. Please also visit http://www.signalpro.biz for more information.