The Tides of EDA

IT WAS A GREAT HONOR to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Design Automation Conference with a keynote lecture intended to place in perspective the most relevant research results presented at DAC in all these years and to identify trends and challenges for the future of electronic design automation (EDA). Going through the DAC proceedings, hunting for relevant papers, was indeed a formidable task. While doing so, I wanted to find regular patterns that those of us in EDA could use to understand the history of our field and its destiny. Fishing into my background as a former student of an Italian classical Lyceum, I found unexpected help from a fellow countryman: Giovan Battista Vico, the first philosopher who analyzed history and its patterns from a philosophical point of view. He wrote his masterpiece, Scientia Nova, in 1650. Vico's fundamental contribution was that history repeats itself with a regular spiral-like pattern (" corsi e ricorsi storici "). Vico identified three phases in mankind's history: the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of men. The age of gods is characterized by knowledge that comes to people from the use of their senses. In this respect, events and natural phenomena are inexplicable (for the most part) and attributed to " external " entities, like the ancient gods. The age of heroes is characterized by the use of imagination that lets people supersede the sensory information to find the first abstract interpretations of reality. It is the age of creativity, the foundation of great human achievements. The following period, the age of men, is characterized by reason—rational analysis that dissects events, during which people fear novelty and creativity as jumps into the dark because no analysis can guarantee any initiative's success. Vico identified the age of men as the beginning of decay in society. Yet he found that after the decadence of this period, mankind would again loop through the three stages, returning to the next age of gods. Quite surprisingly, I found that I could identify similar patterns in the history of EDA. To determine the time span of the ages of EDA, I used attendance data from DAC, shown in Figure 1. In this diagram, we see an initial period, from 1964 to 1978, where attendance was fairly low. Next comes a period—from 1979 to 1992—of great prosperity with a very sharp increase in participation. Finally, from …