IN THE EARLY days, design automation was used more intensely in mechanical and civil engineering. In the 1970s, it became clear that the design of electrical and electronic circuits could be greatly aided by software tools. These tools helped to transfer design to manufacturing with no human intervention, in verifying that design rules were satisfied, in simulating the behavior of the design and in editing the layouts of printed circuit boards and integrated circuits. However in a few years, great advances were made in integrated circuit design with automatic layout, RTL simulation and logic synthesis. These techniques improved radically design productivity to a point that it is possible today to design chips with several millions to one billion transistors. These advances were made possible by the introduction of methodologies that restricted the space of possible designs (for example, regular layout (gate arrays and standard cells), and synchronous design) and by the introduction of layers of abstraction that were well defined and connected to each other (transistors, gates and RTL). The layers of abstraction and the restriction of the design space made it possible to develop algorithms for automatic placement and routing that rivaled and at times beat humans in quality and that were always orders of magnitude faster. The RTL to gate level transformation assuming synchronous design was optimized using sophisticated Boolean operations and mapping algorithms which replaced human logic designers. These tools enabled the creation of a novel electronic design automation (EDA) industry that claimed its space in the software industry Today there is not a single IC company that does not use EDA tools. But because of this fact, EDA's overall market is saturated and enjoys modest growth. Much has been talked about extending EDA in the system space.
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