Modern integrated circuits are enormously complicated both from the point of view of the number of elements on a single semiconductor die and from that of the huge decrease of an elementary pattern. Furthermore, the manufacturing process itself is not completely predictable and requires accounting for its statistical nature. Therefore, integrated circuit design as a subset of electrical engineering encompasses the particular logic and circuit design techniques, which determine the extensive use of automation in the design process of modern integrated circuits.

There is currently a trend to integrate all components of an electronic system into a single chip. One such chip may contain digital, analog, and mixed-signal functions. Integrated circuit design can be thus divided into the broad categories of digital and analog (or more often mixed-signal) integrated circuit design. Analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits are usually designed for a very specific purpose and their design requires a high level of expertise and careful use of computer-aided design tools.