The Tides of EDA

The Tides of EDA Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli University of California at Berkeley Alberto bases this article on remarks from his invited keynote speech at the 40th Design Automation Conference. In that speech, he proposed a bold initiative in electronic design automation, EDATech, of EDA 40 Years which would drive the industry much like SEMATECH propelled semiconductor manufacturing. —Rajesh Gupta, Editor in Chief IT WAS A GREAT HONOR to celebrate the 40th ized by reason—rational analysis that dissects events, anniversary of the Design Automation Conference with a during which people fear novelty and creativity as keynote lecture intended to place in perspective the most jumps into the dark because no analysis can guarantee relevant research results presented at DAC in all these any initiative’s success. Vico identified the age of men years and to identify trends and challenges for the future as the beginning of decay in society. Yet he found that of electronic design automation (EDA). Going through after the decadence of this period, mankind would the DAC proceedings, hunting for relevant papers, was again loop through the three stages, returning to the indeed a formidable task. While doing so, I wanted to find next age of gods. regular patterns that those of us in EDA could use to understand the history of our field and its destiny. Ages of EDA Fishing into my background as a former student of Quite surprisingly, I found that I could identify simi- an Italian classical Lyceum, I found unexpected help lar patterns in the history of EDA. To determine the time from a fellow countryman: Giovan Battista Vico, the first span of the ages of EDA, I used attendance data from philosopher who analyzed history and its patterns from DAC, shown in Figure 1. a philosophical point of view. He wrote his masterpiece, In this diagram, we see an initial period, from 1964 Scientia Nova, in 1650. Vico’s fundamental contribution to 1978, where attendance was fairly low. Next comes was that history repeats itself with a regular spiral-like a period—from 1979 to 1992—of great prosperity with pattern (“corsi e ricorsi storici”). a very sharp increase in participation. Finally, from 1993 Vico identified three phases in mankind’s history: the to today, there is relative stagnation and a marked age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of men. The decrease in the last few years. It seems natural to asso- age of gods is characterized by knowledge that comes ciate these three periods with the ages of gods, heroes, to people from the use of their senses. In this respect, and men as outlined by Vico! events and natural phenomena are inexplicable (for the Another interesting set of statistical data relates to most part) and attributed to “external” entities, like the paper submissions and their origin, as shown in Figure 2. ancient gods. In this diagram, the age of gods corresponds to a The age of heroes is characterized by the use of prevalence of industry papers; the age of heroes, to a imagination that lets people supersede the sensory marked increase in academic papers; and the age of information to find the first abstract interpretations of men, to a predominance of academic papers. reality. It is the age of creativity, the foundation of great human achievements. Age of gods (1964 to 1978) The following period, the age of men, is character- In this period, industry pioneers laid the foundations 0740-7475/03/$17.00 © 2003 IEEE Copublished by the IEEE CS and the IEEE CASS November–December 2003 59 Forty Years of EDA 25,000 300 today, from sparse matrices to backward Total participants differentiation formulas. They enabled 250 20,000 Conference participants the development of two important pro- Exhibiting companies 200 grams: IBM’s Astap (advanced statistical 15,000 analysis program) and UC Berkeley’s 150 Spice (simulation program for integrated 10,000 circuits emphasis). The early contribu- 100 No. of participants tions of Ron Rohrer and Don Pederson 5,000 50 were essential to making these programs No. of exhibiting companies the workhorses of circuit simulation for 0 0 years and years. 1964 1969 1974 1979 1984 1989 1994 1999 Years Logic simulation and testing. Logic Figure 1. DAC attendance from 1964 to 2003. simulation had already been in use for some time when DAC started. Computer companies, such as IBM and CDC, relied 200 on this technology to debug their logic 180 Total papers designs. The contributions to this field 160 Academia are countless, and the field’s founders 140 Industry Vendors also had a fundamental role in develop- 120 ing automatic test pattern generation and 100 fault simulation. The role of Ulrich and 80 Hayes at the University of Michigan; No. of papers 60 40 Breuer at the University of Southern 20 California; and Szygenda at the 0 University of Texas at Austin, to name a few, was invaluable. The invention of a 1964 1967 1970 1973 1976 1979 1982 1985 1988 1991 1994 1997 2000 2003 methodology for level-sensitive scan Years design by Tom Williams and colleagues, Figure 2. DAC paper statistics. and the consequent development of the D-algorithm by Paul Roth of IBM, changed the way in which this industry of EDA. While browsing through the first few years’ pro- designed computer hardware and generated test pat- ceedings, I found seminal papers that continue to have terns. a strong impact today. I classified them by relevant top- ics, and I clustered fundamental contributions into five MOS timing simulation. Exploiting the quasi-unidi- areas: circuit simulation; logic simulation and testing; rectional characteristic of a MOS transistor to speed up MOS timing simulation; wire routing; and regular arrays. circuit simulation first appeared in the work of Gummel and colleagues of Bell Labs in 1975. Gummel’s intuition Circuit simulation. Circuit simulation has been an was to approximate the solution of the ordinary differ- important DAC topic, especially as it relates to IC design. ential equations describing the circuits with a fast relax- The great success of circuit simulation in IC designs has ation-based heuristic algorithm. His insight was to been a dominant driver in the birth of EDA as an indus- recognize that when analyzing a digital circuit’s timing, try. IBM researchers were the most prominent force in its accurate waveforms are unimportant as long as the these years: Frank Branin was a pioneer in determining switching events could be correctly placed in time. This the architecture for circuit simulation. In my opinion, insight is still the basis of today’s fast circuit simulation. Brayton, Hachtel, and colleagues at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown made fundamental, rev- Wire routing. Most of the techniques that we use today olutionary contributions to this field: They introduced in our tools are based on the results obtained in this peri- the algorithms behind circuit simulation as we know it od. The infamous Lee maze router developed in 1961 60 IEEE Design & Test of Computers (before the first DAC), is still the basis for most of the ■ Their products had limited loyalty because cus- routers in use today. The Hightower line extension algo- tomers perceived their value added as low. rithm dates back to 1969, and the idea of channel routing ■ These companies had a limited understanding of came from the work by Hashimoto and Stevens in 1971. market evolutions and customer needs. Regular arrays. With the advent of large-scale ICs, the These factors contributed to a complete lack of inno- appeal of regular layout patterns for reducing design vation and eventual obsolescence. time was strong. Researchers developed gate arrays I cannot conclude the age of gods without mention- (called master slices at IBM) and standard cells (master ing Pat Pistilli’s particular role: He nurtured DAC from a images at IBM) as alternatives to custom layouts. In this handful of attendees to over 5,000 at the technical ses- period, IBM and Bell Labs made extensive use of inte- sions. Our celebration of DAC’s 40th anniversary is a grated tools using these design styles for the automatic tribute to his vision. layout of circuits. I remember the beginning of this idea, when a gate array IC had four gates and a Schlumberger Age of heroes (1979 to 1993) researcher discussed the use of automated tools to It is surprising to see that between 1979 and 1993 the optimize the circuit’s utilization. Look at the distance EDA field exploded in all its aspects. To be at DAC dur- we’ve covered since then: in 40 years, from four to 400 ing this period was quite an experience. The vibrancy million gates on a single chip. and enthusiasm that permeated the presentation rooms and the exhibits was a clear sign of the community’s Business side healthy growth. DAC became the source of many essen- Observers considered computer-aided design to be tial contributions in all aspects of EDA from physical ver- of strategic value to the system industry, and in particu- ification to layout synthesis, from logic synthesis to lar, to the computer industry. IBM and the other large formal verification, and from system-level design to companies considered it important enough to warrant a hardware acceleration. The technical community sizable investment in funding and resources. Internal expanded to reach areas of expertise in nonlinear and CAD groups were powerful engineering organizations. combinatorial optimization, control, artificial intelli- Looking at the DAC proceedings, I also noticed the gence, and logic. In this quest for new methods and strong presence of the Japanese computer and com- tools, the community also explored avenues that did munication system industry.

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