DAC 50th Anniversary Keynote

h THE EDA INDUSTRY has been a tremendous place to be in the last 50 years. The reason is the same as any other exciting industry, consisting of two things: First, the exciting, tough, and technical problems to solve that make a real difference, that change the world, and that change the way we do things; and second is the financial growth and opportunity. To start new companies, grow those companies, and grow small companies into big companies. It’s true today in social networking and biotechnology, but also semiconductor electronics and EDA. Probably no technical challenge or change has been greater than what’s happened because of EDA over the last 25 years. With about a 3% per year growth in the number of electronics engineers, the number of transistors designed and produced has increased five orders of magnitude in 25 years, enabling products we never imagined possible. And with those technical challenges has come growth. In an industry where our customers did largely manual design in the 1960s and well into the 1970s, following an approach of ‘‘design it, build it, test it, and redesign it’’. Automation has now created a flow and an industry of over $6 billion dollars. But as you know, all good things have to come to an end. And we hear about Moore’s Law, it’s coming to an end. Even Gordon says no exponential can be forever. And yet for a dying law, it’s doing pretty well. You take a look at the percent of wafers produced with each technology node, and what you notice in the last four, and soon to be another generation, that the slope of adoption of new technology has accelerated, not slowed. Ramp-up is happening even faster. And if you look at the technology challenges we face today, just to implement 20, 14, and 10 nanometer processes, we’re undergoing one of the most disruptive changes that we’ve seen in years: a Editor’s notes: This article is based on a visionary talk presented at the 50th DAC. It illustrates the role of EDA in shaping the semiconductor industry in the past 50th years, and its exciting technical challenges in the next 50 years to shape the big systems. VYervant Zorian, Synopsys