Evolving EDA Beyond its E-Roots: An Overview (invited paper)

Over the past decade, CMOS scaling has seen increasingly intrusive challenges from cost, variability, energy, reliability, and fundamental device-architectural and materials limitations. To maintain Moore’s-Law scaling of integration value, the industry is urgently exploring beyond-silicon and beyond-CMOS device, interconnect and memory options, as well as heterogeneous, “More than Moore” integration and packaging technologies. This coincides with a turning point for the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) field, which has for 50+ years been a key enabler of the semiconductor industry’s amazing growth. Maturation of the EDA industry and its related academic research efforts inevitably result in a spiral of declining valuations (multiples), venture capital investments, research funding, and student interest. To counter this trajectory, the EDA field’s business models, research portfolios, and funding models have been going through various diversifications, but in a rather ad-hoc manner. This begs the question of how the paradigms and research methodologies of EDA can be leveraged for design automation (DA) in other, emerging domains. Arguably, more efficient evolution and growth as a community requires a more systematic, coherent effort – as well as forward-looking vision – to steer by. In this paper, we review initial efforts of a new IEEE CEDA technical activity group dedicated to this purpose. These efforts span the cataloguing of past and current research trends, development of new metrics of research impact, and visions for future applications of EDA paradigms in broader design automation contexts. It is hoped that these efforts will be useful to the EDA community as it continues to evolve beyond its “E-roots”.