I started my career as an EE designer nearly 30 yrs ago, coincident with the EDA industry’s Big Bang triumvirate of “Daisy-Mentor-Valid”. Things were so simple back then: CAD tools helped you capture a schematic, generate a netlist, and – with any luck – simulate a few thousand digital gates. Of course, for analog design, SPICE was the anchor – and 30 years later, little has changed!. Sure, every company had package experts, and thermal / stress experts, and CMOS process experts, but they were too-often hidden from the digital team behind closed walls.

Today, things are much more complex – and those old walls are now becoming inter-connected webs. Every discipline is interacting and cross-communicating, because failure to do so costs in schedule and performance. Floorplanning tools were a major advancement, the first time that the IC design team brought physical design details upstream. Soon after, “physical synthesis” tools blended the early physical and electrical disciplines together into communicating algorithms to improve timing and performance. This led to the “platform era” where an array of tools from a vendor became more tightly integrated together to design digital silicon (OpenAccess then contributed greatly to enabling multi-vendor integration). In recent years, these platforms have incorporated analog and digital design across the flow, including both early and late stages of design refinement. However, this will still not be sufficient for our next chapter of growth.

As the IC industry embraces “More Than Moore” challenges, it is clear that we must refresh our old paradigms in EDA – and likewise in EDA standards. For example, 3D stacked die is an important emerging area – including 3D circuits and 3D interconnect (TSVs). One can draw parallels with the early days of IC floorplanning (called “pathfinding” in 3D) and the trend for more tightly-interconnected algorithms across disciplines. We won’t get there in one step, and that’s fine – this market needs to develop, starting with “2.5-D”, then “2.9-D”, and so on. Yet over time we must integrate physical, electrical, thermal, mechanical, packaging, test, DFM, and reliability disciplines together. “Frontend” and “backend” cannot be used as simple labels for separation of concerns – since some abstraction of all aspects will be needed throughout the flow.

I can use a different example to bust our old paradigms: embedded software integration, and even application software integration (as in “EDA360″). Is it accurate to consider software design a “frontend” activity, or physical silicon design a “backend” activity? Just ask any software designer when his job is “done” and it is obvious that ongoing software / firmware updates continue well after the product has shipped (there isn’t much more “backend” than that!). The truth of the matter is that we must all interact across the entire design flow to create effective products to have any chance of satisfying performance, schedule, and cost requirements.

So, my appeal is for a fresh way of looking at EDA, and by logical consequence EDA standards. We must shed the old and outdated sequential “waterfall” paradigm, and embrace instead the modern “spiral” development paradigm of multi-discipline, inter-connected design refinement. In this way, we will have a much better chance to achieve our growth and efficiency objectives for our industry – from 3D to EDA360.