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.
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. The segments of the industry that must use EDA are chip designers at semiconductor companies. Large chips are too complex to be designed by hand. EDA for electronics has rapidly increased in importance with the continuous scaling of semiconductor technology. EDA tools are also used for programming design functionality into FPGAs.
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. By the mid-70s, developers had started 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. Another crucial development was the formation of MOSIS, a consortium of universities and fabricators that developed an inexpensive way to train student chip designers by producing real integrated circuits. The basic idea was to use reliable, low-cost, relatively low-technology IC processes and pack a large number of projects per wafer, with just a few copies of each projects’ chips. Cooperating fabricators either donated the processed wafers, or sold them at cost, finding the program helpful for their own long-term growth.
1981 marked the beginning of EDA as an industry. For many years, the larger electronic companies, such as Hewlett Packard, Tektronix and Intel, had pursued EDA internally. In 1981, managers and developers spun out of these companies to concentrate on EDA as a business. Daisy Systems, Mentor Graphics and Valid Logic Systems were all founded around this time, and collectively referred to as DMV. Within a few years there were many companies specializing in EDA, each with a slightly different emphasis.
In 1986, Verilog, a popular high-level design language, was first introduced as a hardware description language by Gateway. In 1987, the US Department of Defense funded the creation of VHDL as a specification language. Simulators quickly followed these introductions permitting direct simulation of chip designs—executable specifications. In a few more years, back-ends were developed to perform logic synthesis. Many of the EDA companies acquire small companies with software or other technology that can be adapted to their core business. Most of the market leaders are rather incestuous amalgamations of many smaller companies. This trend is helped by the tendency of software companies to design tools as accessories that fit naturally into a larger vendor’s suite of programs. (On digital circuitry, many new tools incorporate analog design and mixed systems. This is happening because there is now a trend to place entire electronic systems on a single chip.)
Current digital flows are extremely modular. The front ends produce standardized design descriptions that compile into invocations of ‘cells’, without regard to the cell technology. Cells implement logic or other electronic functions, using a particular integrated circuit technology. Fabricators generally provide libraries of components for their production processes, with simulation models that fit standard simulation tools. Analog EDA tools are much less modular, since many more functions are required, they interact more strongly, and the components are less ideal.
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