The Evolution of Design Automation to Meet the Challanges of VLSI

This paper presents the author's opinion of the major problems confronting Design Automation for VLSI and how Design Automation may evolve to meet these challenges. The paper first takes a historical look at the driving forces for Design Automation development by analyzing the evolution of Design Automation at RCA. It looks at both some successful and unsuccessful development efforts and attempts to isolate some of the criteria necessary for success. It review RCA's current LSI Design Automation capabilities and compares them to the challenge of VLSI. The major challenges -- layout, design verification and testability -- are discussed along with possible achievable solutions.