Electronic Design Automation

5.1. Introduction

A key goal of electronic design automation (EDA) is to shrink the rapidly growing “designer productivity gap” that exists between how many transistors we can manufacture per chip, and how many person-years we need to complete a design with that many transistors. Collectively, EDA provides to chip designers a design method, which can be considered as a set of complementary design tools built on a design abstraction (i.e., a mechanism to conceptualize the chip design), as well as a set of processes and guidelines that indicate the flow of design, ordering of tool application, strategies for incorporating late engineering changes, etc. The software design tools include design entry tools, which capture design specification; ...