electronic design automation ecad redirects here for the brazilian music licensing organization see escritrio central de arrecadao e distribuio for other uses see ecad disambiguation electronic design automation eda also referred to as electronic computeraided design ecad is a category of software tools for designing electronic systems such as integrated circuits and printed circuit boards the tools work together in a design flow that chip designers use to design and analyze entire semiconductor chips since a modern semiconductor chip can have billions of components eda tools are essential for their design this article describes eda specifically with respect to integrated circuits history early days before eda integrated circuits were designed by hand and manually laid out some advanced shops used geometric software to generate the tapes for the gerber photoplotter but even those copied digital recordings of mechanically drawn components the process was fundamentally graphic with the translation from electronics to graphics done manually the best known company from this era was calma whose gdsii format survives by the mid1970s developers started to automate the design along with the drafting the first placement and routing place and route tools were developed the proceedings of the design automation conference cover much of this era the next era began about the time of the publication of introduction to vlsi systems by carver mead and lynn conway in 1980 this ground breaking text advocated chip design with programming languages that compiled to silicon the immediate result was a considerable increase in the complexity of the chips that could be designed with improved access to design verification tools that used logic simulation often the chips were easier to lay out and more likely to function correctly since their designs could be simulated more thoroughly prior to construction although the languages and tools have evolved this general approach of specifying the desired behavior in a textual programming language and letting the tools derive the detailed physical design remains the basis of digital ic design today the earliest eda tools were produced academically one of the most famous was the berkeley vlsi tools tarball a set of unix utilities used to design early vlsi systems still widely used are the espresso heuristic logic minimizer and magic another crucial development was the formation of mosis a consortium of universities and fabricators that developed an inexpensive way to train student chip designers by producing real integrated circuits the basic concept was to use reliable lowcost relatively lowtechnology ic processes and pack a large number of projects per wafer with just a few copies of each projects chips cooperating fabricators either donated the processed wafers or sold them at cost seeing the program as helpful to their own longterm growth birth of commercial eda 1981 marks the beginning of eda as an industry for many years the larger electronic companies such as hewlett packard tektronix and intel had pursued eda internally in 1981 managers and developers spun out of these companies to concentrate on eda as a business daisy systems mentor graphics and valid logic systems were all founded around this time and collectively referred to as dmv within a few years there were many companies specializing in eda each with a slightly different emphasis the first trade show for eda was held at the design automation conference in 1984 in 1981 the us department of defense began funding of vhdl as a hardware description language in 1986 verilog another popular highlevel design language was first introduced as a hardware description language by gateway design automation simulators quickly followed these introductions permitting direct simulation of chip designs executable specifications in a few more years backends were developed to perform logic synthesis current status current digital flows are extremely modular see integrated circuit design design closure and design flow eda the front ends produce standardized design descriptions that compile into invocations of cells without regard to the cell technology cells implement logic or other electronic functions using a particular integrated circuit technology fabricators generally provide libraries of components for their production processes with simulation models that fit standard simulation tools analog eda tools are far less modular since many more functions are required they interact more strongly and the components are in general less ideal eda for electronics has rapidly increased in importance with the continuous scaling of semiconductor technology some users are foundry operators who operate the semiconductor fabrication facilities or fabs and designservice companies who use eda software to evaluate an incoming design for manufacturing readiness eda tools are also used for programming design functionality into fpgas software focuses design design flow eda highlevel synthesis or behavioural synthesis algorithmic synthesis highlevel design description eg in cc is converted into rtl logic synthesis translation of rtl design description eg written in verilog or vhdl into a discrete netlist of logic gates schematic capture for standard cell digital analog rflike capture cis in orcad by cadence and isis in proteus layout usually schematicdriven layout like layout in orcad by cadence ares in proteus simulation electronic circuit simulation transistor simulation lowlevel transistorsimulation of a schematiclayouts behavior accurate at devicelevel logic simulation digitalsimulation of an rtl or gatenetlists digital boolean 01 behavior accurate at booleanlevel behavioral simulation highlevel simulation of a designs architectural operation accurate at cyclelevel or interfacelevel hardware emulation use of special purpose hardware to emulate the logic of a proposed design can sometimes be plugged into a system in place of a yettobebuilt chip this is called incircuit emulation technology cad simulate and analyze the underlying process technology electrical properties of devices are derived directly from device physics electromagnetic field solvers or just field solvers solve maxwells equations directly for cases of interest in ic and pcb design they are known for being slower but more accurate than the layout extraction above schematic capture program analysis and verification functional verification clock domain crossing verification cdc check similar to linting but these checkstools specialize in detecting and reporting potential issues like data loss metastability due to use of multiple clock domains in the design formal verification also model checking attempts to prove by mathematical methods that the system has certain desired properties and that certain undesired effects such as deadlock cannot occur equivalence checking algorithmic comparison between a chips rtldescription and synthesized gatenetlist to ensure functional equivalence at the logical level static timing analysis analysis of the timing of a circuit in an inputindependent manner hence finding a worst case over all possible inputs physical verification pv checking if a design is physically manufacturable and that the resulting chips will not have any functionpreventing physical defects and will meet original specifications manufacturing preparation mask data preparation mdp generation of actual lithography photomask used to physically manufacture the chip resolution enhancement techniques ret methods of increasing of quality of final photomask optical proximity correction opc upfront compensation for diffraction and interference effects occurring later when chip is manufactured using this mask mask generation generation of flat mask image from hierarchical design automatic test pattern generation atpg generates patterndata to systematically exercise as many logicgates and other components as possible builtin selftest or bist installs selfcontained testcontrollers to automatically test a logic or memory structure in the design functional safety functional safety analysis systematic computation of failure in time fit rates and diagnostic coverage metrics for designs in order to meet the compliance requirements for the desired safety integrity levels functional safety synthesis add reliability enhancements to structured elements modules rams roms register files fifos to improves fault detection fault tolerance these includes not limited to addition of error detection and or correction codes hamming redundant logic for fault detection and fault tolerance duplicate triplicate and protocol checks interface parity address alignment beat count functional safety verificationrunning of a fault campaign including insertion of faults into the design and verification that the safety mechanism reacts in an appropriate manner for the faults that are deemed covered pcb layout and schematic for connector design companies further information list of eda companies old companies market capitalization and company name as of december2011 577 billion synopsys 446 billion cadence 233 billion mentor graphics 507 million magma design automation synopsys acquired magma in february 2012 nt644 billion springsoft synopsys acquired springsoft in august 2012 1195 billion zuken inc note eesof should likely be on this list but it does not have a market cap as it is the eda division of keysight acquisitions list of eda companies many of the eda companies acquire small companies with software or other technology that can be adapted to their core business this trend is helped by the tendency of software companies to design tools as accessories that fit naturally into a larger vendors suite of programs on digital circuitry many new tools incorporate analog design and mixed systems this is happening because there is now a trend to place entire electronic systems on a single chip electronics portal wikimedia commons has media related to electronic design automation computeraided design cad circuit design eda database signoff electronic design automation comparison of eda software platformbased design notes httpwwwstaticfreesoftcomdocumentstextbookhtml computer aids for vlsi design by steven m rubin electronic design automation for integrated circuits handbook by lavagno martin and scheffer isbn0849330963 2006 combinatorial algorithms for integrated circuit layout by thomas lengauer isbn3519021102 teubner verlag 1997 the electronic design automation handbook by dirk jansen et al kluwer academic publishers isbn1402075022 2003 available also in german isbn3446212884 2005 vtecad softwarefree and opensourcemechanical brlcad freecad heekscad librecad open cascade technology openscad qcad salome solvespace electrical electric fritzing geda kicad ktechlab magic oregano qucs xcircuit proprietarymechanical autocad autodesk alias autodesk inventor autodesk revit archicad bricscad cadkey catia 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