A new era for CAD

摘要

It would not be inaccurate to call the 1990s the Cream Puff era of semiconductors. Plain old vanilla CMOS ruled the land. Other contenders, such as GAAS and Silicon on Insulator, played minor roles in the market place. The RTL Methodology drove EDA tool development for the entire decade. Movement from silicon node to silicon node was accomplished with incremental process improvements. Design Tool development, from EDA generation to EDA generation, added new analysis capability onto already existing tools. It all looked easy, so easy in fact that the Foundry vendors were able to make great strides without a significant investment in R&D. Welcome to the new ERA of CAD. This decade looks much more like the challenging 1970s and 1980s than the Cream Puff era of the 1990s.