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). In the period from 1970 to the present semiconductor advances such as the following have had a great impact on EDA technology: IC integration has grown from tens of transistors on a chip, to beyond tens of millions; feature size on production ICs has shrunk from 10 µm to 90 nm and smaller; and on-chip clock frequency has increased from a few megahertz to many gigahertz. Playing an essential part in the advancement of EDA have been advances in computer architectures that run the EDA applications. With the introduction of the alphanumeric terminal, the keypunch was replaced as the window into the computer. With this, new design description languages were developed, and the role of the transcription operator began to move back to the designer.
