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Electronic design automation (EDA) is the category of tools for designing and producing electronic systems ranging from printed circuit boards (PCBs) to integrated circuits. This is sometimes referred to as ECAD (electronic computer-aided design) or just CAD. more...

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(Printed circuit boards and wire wrap both contain specialized discussions of the EDA used for those.)

Terminology

The term EDA is also used as an umbrella term for computer-aided engineering, computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing of electronics in the discipline of electrical engineering. This usage probably originates in the IEEE Design Automation Technical Committee.

This article describes EDA specifically for electronics, and concentrates on EDA used for designing integrated circuits. The segment of the industry that must use EDA are chip designers at semiconductor companies. Large chips are too complex to design by hand.

Growth of EDA

EDA for electronics has rapidly increased in importance with the continuous scaling of semiconductor technology. (See Moore's Law.) Some users are foundry operators, who operate the semiconductor fabrication facilities, or "fabs", and design-service companies who use EDA software to evaluate an incoming design for manufacturing readiness. EDA tools are also used for programming design functionality into FPGAs.

History

Before EDA, integrated circuits were designed by hand, and manually laid out. Some advanced shops used geometric software to generate the tapes for the Gerber photoplotter, but even those copied digital recordings of mechanically-drawn components. The process was fundamentally graphic, with the translation from electronics to graphics done manually. The best known company from this era was Calma, whose GDSII format survives.

By the mid-70s, developers were starting to automate the design, and not just the drafting. The first placement and routing (Place and route) tools were developed. The proceedings of the Design Automation Conference cover much of this era.

The next era began more or less with the publication of "Introduction to VLSI Systems" by Carver Mead and Lynn Conway in 1980. This groundbreaking text advocated chip design with programming languages that compiled to silicon. The immediate result was a hundredfold increase in the complexity of the chips that could be designed, with improved access to design verification tools that used logic simulation. Often the chips were not just easier to lay out, but more correct as well, because their designs could be simulated more thoroughly before construction.

The earliest EDA tools were produced academically, and were in the public domain. One of the most famous was the "Berkeley VLSI Tools Tarball", a set of UNIX utilities used to design early VLSI systems. Still widely used is the Espresso heuristic logic minimizer and Magic.

Read more at Wikipedia.org