Essential Electronic Design Automation (EDA)

Summary

The system design constraints (rules, specifications, and guidelines) define the design space. System engineers use computer modeling to make design trade-offs with in the design space. They explore trade-offs such as cost, performance, development risk, or TTM.

Re-use of standard known parts can speed the design and reduce the risk. These parts are called intellectual property (IP) and include blocks such as microprocessors, memory, encryption modules, and I/O interfaces. (Re-use is often difficult to achieve in practice, however. Appendix F discusses re-use and IP in more detail.)

System tools include high-level modeling programs, system-level description languages, and automatic test bench generators.

Historically, the hardware is ...