The Next 25 Years in EDA: A Cloudy Future?

The report on the 2009 NSF Workshop that focuses on EDA's Past, Present and Future was published by Brayton and Cong in two parts in IEEE D&T. A complete design and verification flow can quickly add up to 1 2 million lines of TCL to control the tools and deal with the setup and environment in which IP and models are stored. And once the design flow is up and running, a large number of Perl scripts are written to extract the key information from the terabytes of reports and design data. It is often difficult to know how many of these scripts exist in a design environment since they are often owned by individual designers. In addition to all the configuration and control files a large amount of data gets generated and stored. EDA data is of much less Variety than the much more unstructured data collected from many sensors in Smarter Planet applications.