Humans for EDA and EDA for humans

Abstract

Two misconceptions have been plaguing the electronic design automation (EDA) industry for decades: i) EDA solutions scale to larger complexities at an insufficient rate to keep pace with improvements in silicon designs; and ii) since EDA applications target silicon chip developments, the growth of EDA as an industry is bounded by the growth of the semiconductor industry. With this paper we address these misconceptions and we argue that they can both be overcome. To this end, we overview a number of initial studies highlighting possible directions that EDA can pursue to (i) break off from its traditional ways of scaling solutions and applications to larger complexity, that is, by developing better heuristics for its complex algorithms. (ii) We also discuss alternative domains where EDA technology can be applied, beyond that of silicon design, so that the semiconductor industry is no longer the limit of EDA growth.