The Essential Role of Procedural Approaches in Electronic Design Automation

Electronic design automation approaches can roughly be divided into optimizers and procedures. While the former have enabled highly automated synthesis flows for digital integrated circuits, the latter play a vital (but mostly underestimated role) in the analog domain. This paper describes both automation strategies in comparison, identifying two fundamentally different automation paradigms that reflect the two basic design practices known as “top-down” and “bottom-up”. Then, with a focus on the latter, the history of procedural approaches is traced from their early beginnings until today’s evolvements and future prospects to underline their practical importance and to accentuate their scientific value, both in itself and in the overall context of EDA.