The Next 25 Years in EDA: A Cloudy Future?

h AT THE 50TH Design Automation Conference, Soha Hassoun organized a session to review the first 50 years of EDA and predict the next 25. While Bill Joyner [1] could draw upon the vast paper resources that MPA collected during the first 25 years of DAC and Rob Rutenbar [2] was able to apply some amazing analytics to the second 25 years of DAC proceedings, I turned to crowd sourcing to solicit input on the next 25 years. It was clear from Bill’s and Rob’s presentations that many people were drawn to the EDA industry for the same reason I got hooked: EDA was on the forefront of computing. Many of the largest computational problems that needed to be solved were EDA problems. The university groups focusing on EDA had the largest and fastest computers. If one wanted to solve largescale computer science problems, EDA was the place to be for most of the last 50 years. Is that still the case? The replies to the ‘‘next 25 years of EDA’’ survey pointed out many of the challenges that EDA tools will need to address in the next decade. Key challenges will come from next lithography solutions such as Triple Patterning, EUV, DSA (direct selfassembly) or Ebeam. Many respondents pointed to the problems that next generation nanodevices such as photonics, bio based circuits, quantum, and carbon might bring. However, as shown in Figure 1, a large number of participants pointed out how IT and specifically cloud computing will have a major impact on the way EDA tools will be used. This is particularly interesting because in the ‘‘EDAC Forecast Meeting’’ on 14 March 2013 [4], the impression was left that cloud and EDA do not mix well. Earlier DAC panels [5] also pointed out the significant hurdles to overcome for EDA to be cloud friendly. In this article, I decided to zoom in on this one aspect of the next 25 years of EDA and will outline why we need to bring Cloud Computing and EDA together to deliver the next leap of design productivity and at the same time, restore the excitement in the EDA discipline.