| Electronic Design Automation (EDA) is a spectacular success in the art of engineering.Over the last quarter of a century, improved tools have raised designers’ productivity by a factor of more than a thousand.
Without EDA,Moore’s law would remain a useless curiosity. Not a single billion-transistor chip could be designed or debugged without these sophisticated tools, so without EDA we would have no laptops, cell phones, video games, or any of the other electronic devices we take for granted.
But spurred on by the ability to build bigger chips, EDA developers have largely kept pace, and these enormous chips can still be designed, debugged, and tested,-and in fact, with decreasing time to market. The story of EDA is much more complex than the progression of integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing, which is based on simple physical scaling of critical dimensions. Instead, EDA evolves by a series of paradigm shifts. Every chapter in this book, all 49 of them, was just a gleam in some expert’s eye just a few decades ago. Then it became a research topic, then an academic tool, and then the focus of a startup or two. Within a few years, it was supported by large commercial EDA vendors, and is now part of the conventional wisdom. Although users always complain that today’s tools are not quite adequate for today’s designs, the overall improvements in productivity have been remarkable. After all, in what other field do people complain of only a 21% compound annual growth in productivity, sustained over three decades, as did the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors in 1999? |
