EDA for IC Implementation, Circuit Design, and Process Technology PDF
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?
And what is the future of EDA tools? As we look at the state of electronics and integrated circuit design in the 2005–2006 timeframe, we see that we may soon enter a major period of change in the discipline. The classical scaling approach to integrated circuits, spanning multiple orders of magnitude in the size of devices over the last 40 years, looks set to last only a few more generations or process nodes (though this has been argued many times in the past, and has invariably been proved to be too pessimistic a projection).
Conventional transistors and wiring may well be replaced by new nano and biologically-based technologies that we are currently only beginning to experiment with. This profound change will surely have a considerable impact on the tools and methodologies used to design integrated circuits. Should we be spending our efforts looking at CAD for these future technologies, or continue to improve the tools we currently use?
Upon further consideration, it is clear that the current EDA approaches have a lot of life left in them.
With at least a decade remaining in the evolution of current design approaches, and hundreds of thousands or millions of designs left that must either craft new ICs or use programmable versions of them, it
is far too soon to forget about today’s EDA approaches. And even if the technology changes to radically new forms and structures, many of today’s EDA concepts will be reused and evolved for design into technologies well beyond the current scope and thinking.
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