Position Statement: Design Automation and VLSI in the 80's

Summary form only given, as follows. The density of silicon integrated circuits has been increasing by a factor of two per year and this increase can be expected to continue in the forseeable future. This increasing scale of integration requires the use of comprehensive aids in order to prevent the design intervals from becoming excessively long and to limit the expenditure of design resources per circuit. With the increasing density and the trend to larger chips, silicon utilization will not be as critical a consideration as it has been in the past. It is therefore likely that faster turnaround and lower design cost can be achieved at the expense of some silicon area. Turnaround time and design cost considerations will likely cause the design style to become more modular and the use of predesigned blocks will become more common.