IEEE council for electronic design automation: a new beginning

T he IEEE Council for Electronic Design Automation (C-EDA) is a new IEEE initiative, but it finds its roots in the past 40 years of design automation R&D. EDA has a rich and dynamic history. In the beginning, several parallel efforts began in the captive semiconductor industry. Soon after, Donald O. Pederson’s group at the University of California, Berkeley, released the open-source SPICE program, which made it possible to characterize circuits accurately from emerging microelectronic device technologies. At that time, most design automation R&D was concentrated in a few top institutions, such as IBM (the Logic Synthesis System), Bell Laboratories (the LTX place-and-route system), University of California, Berkeley (circuit analysis), Stanford University (Technology CAD), and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (high-level synthesis). Then, in the last two decades, R&D of design automation and test tools spread to many sites worldwide, and several companies grew in size and revenue (Cadence, Synopsys, Mentor, PDF, Ansoft, Magma, and CoWare, to name a few). The design automation technical community has been growing throughout the world, and design automation is becoming a major part of computer engineering curricula. Innovations and practical advances have created a vibrant EDA industry that currently stands at $4 billion. This industry includes companies at the leading edge of research and innovation in microelectronic technologies, including emerging issues in design verification, design for manufacturability, and system design. The enormous growth in the technical community has also given rise to numerous conferences, symposia, workshops, and consortia, as well as research funding programs. Within the IEEE, the EDA community has been scattered across multiple societies, and its technical activities have involved diverse technical groups such as the Circuits and Systems Society and the Computer Society. Over the years, these organizations have done a great job of supporting EDA activities. However, the technical volunteers have long felt the need for a home for EDA-related activities to help reach the targeted technical audience and attract the best possible talent. C-EDA, approved in June 2005 by the IEEE Board of Directors, will begin sponsoring (or cosponsoring) most EDA activities—notably, the Design Automation Conference (DAC), the IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, the International Conference on CAD (ICCAD), and IEEE Design & Test. By reorganizing its operation in IEEE Council for Electronic Design Automation: A New Beginning