Design Autom 38 . Design Automation for Microelectronics

Design automation or computer-aided design (CAD) for microelectronic circuits has emerged since the creation of integrated circuits (IC). It has played a crucial role to enable the rapid development of hardware and software systems in the past several decades. CAD techniques are the key driving forces behind the reduction of circuit design time and the optimization of circuit quality. Meanwhile, the exponential growth of circuit capacity driven by Moore’s law prompts new and critical challenges for CAD techniques. Moore’s law describes an important trend in the history of the semiconductor industry: that the number of transistors per unit chip area would be doubled approximately every 2 years. This observation was first made by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in a paper in 1965. Moore’s law has held true for the past four decades, and many people believe that it will continue to apply for at least another decade before reaching the fundamental physical limits of device fabrication. In this chapter we will introduce the fundamentals of design automation as an engineering field. We begin with several important processor 38.1 Overview.............................................. 653 38.1.1 Background on Microelectronic Circuits ............. 653 38.1.2 History of Electronic Design Automation .... 656