On the initiative of the professors Ole Olesen and Christer Svensson from Technical University of Denmark and Linköping University respectively and with support from NORDFORSK NORCHIP was formed in 1981 as a Nordic Multi Project Chip organization. The very first run was processed in 1982 with ten designs originating from research groups in Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway. Until 1989 92 process runs were completed with more than 2000 designs originating from academia and enterprises.
In 1988, the CEC launched a call for tenders to select a consortium to serve European universities for a number of services including multi project chip fabrication. As a result, the EUROCHIP organization was set up including NORCHIP, CMP from France, the German National Research Center for Computer Science (GMD), the Inter-University Center for Microelectronics (IMEC) in Belgium, and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in the UK. Later, EUROCHIP issued a call for tenders towards vendors in 1989, and the service started in 1990.
From 1990 NORCHIP continued the conferences as a Nordic forum for the presentation and discussions of recent advances in design and prototyping of VLSI circuits and systems. The conference brought together experts and leaders from industry and academia to exchange ideas, concepts and results of design, verification, prototyping and testing of VLSI circuits and systems.
1st 1983 in Copenhagen
2nd 1984 in Stockholm
3rd 1985 in Copenhagen
4th 1986 in Helsinki
5th 1987 in Trondheim
6th 1988 in Copenhagen
7th 1989 in Stockholm
8th 1990 in Lund
9th 1991 in Copenhagen
10th 1992 in Helsinki
11th 1993 in Trondheim
12th 1994 in Gothenburg
13th 1995 in Copenhagen
14th 1996 in Helsinki
15th 1997 in Tallinn
16th 1998 in Lund
17th 1999 in Oslo
18th 2000 in Turku
19th 2001 in Stockholm
20th 2002 in Copenhagen
21st 2003 in Riga
22nd 2004 in Oslo
23rd 2005 in Oulu
24th 2006 in Linköping
25th 2007 in Aalborg
26th 2008 in Tallinn
27th 2009 in Trondheim
28th 2010 in Tampere
29th 2011 in Lund
From 1986-89 in the conference was jointly organized with the Nordic Silicon Compiler Project (NORSILC) established as a spin-off from NORCHIP.
Since 1992 a special issue of the Kluwer journal (now Springer) on Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing has been published with selected papers from NORCHIP.
Since 2002 selected digital papers have been published in scientific journals. The journal currently used is Embedded Hardware Design (MICPRO) published by Elsevier.
From 1996 NORCHIP achieved the IEEE Region 8 label and from 2005 it was technically supported by IEEE through the Circuits and Systems Society (CASS) and consequently all papers are listed on IEEE Xplore
In 1997 the conference was for the first time organized outside the Nordic countries in Tallinn and since then the Baltic States have been integrated in the conference.
The NORCHIP Board members over time include:
Since 1985 the conference secretariat has been run by Ivan Ring Nielsen, Technoconsult.
[NORCHIP]