ABSTRACT
No invention in the modern age has been as pervasive as the semiconductor and nothing has been more important to its technological advancement than has electronic design automation (EDA). EDA began in the 1960s both for the design of electronic computers and because of them. It was the advent of the computer that made possible the development of specialized programs that perform the complex management, design, and analysis operations associated with electronics and electronic systems. At the same time, it was the design, management, and manufacture of the thousands (now tens of millions) of devices that make up a single electronic assembly that made EDA an absolute requirement to fuel the semiconductor progression. Today, EDA programs are used in electronic packages for all business markets from computers to games, telephones to aerospace guidance systems, and toasters to automobiles. Across these markets, EDA supports many different package types such as integrated circuit (IC) chips, multichip modules (MCMs), printed circuit boards (PCBs), and entire electronic system assemblies. No electronic circuit package is as challenging to EDA as the IC. The growth in complexity of ICs has
placed tremendous demands on EDA. Mainstream EDA applications such as simulation, layout, and test generation have had to improve their speed and capacity characteristics with this ever-increasing growth in the number of circuits to be processed. New types of design and analysis applications, new methodologies, and new design rules have been necessary to keep pace. Yet, even with the technological breakthroughs that have been made in EDA across the past four decades, it is still having difficulty keeping up with the breakthroughs being made in the semiconductor technology progression that it fuels. Decrease in size and spacing of features on the chip is causing the number of design elements per chip to increase at a tremendous rate. The decrease in feature size and spacing coupled with the increase in operating frequency is causing additional levels of complexity to be approximated in the models used by design and analysis programs.
