Custom IC design and design environments

29 Sep 2008 • 1 minute read

Design environments have come quite a long way from the time I began my engineering career. It is amazing to see how far we have come from stitching together designs as netlists to run rudimentary simulations, to today’s integrated tools with validation required across a plethora of conditions. In those days, I also remember you only needed one engineer per chip.

With today's levels of design complexity, additional tool capabilities are required and yet there are almost as many opinions on the right strategy as there are custom design engineers..... Maybe more!!. However, solutions are starting to coalesce to meet these challenges with one of the biggest challenges coming from capturing the designer intent as additional IP to leverage subsequent reuse/retargeting.

Design strategies and the environments to support today's designs, are not something that happens overnight, but takes time to evolve. With close relationships between EDA vendors and their customers, they mature into tools that can take on the designs of today, while adding the productivity and collaboration required to meet ever tightening deadlines. This is of course, not forgetting the quality goals of the design and the process itself, while allowing for more flexibility and creativity of an ever-increasing design team.

I’m curious about what you think. How have you seen circuit design and analysis change over the past 5-10-20 years and what do think are the next challenges?