Rapid Prototype Blog

Archive for the ‘Electronic Design’ Category

While explaining the term Electronic design Automation (EDA), many individuals wrongly think it is concerned with electronic component manufacturing automation that covers things like PLC programming and computer controlled of conveyor belt. Actually, the two are quite distinct in nature.  

EDA domain is only in software. It is about the use of software to help integrated circuit (IC) designers to design ICs. Software of this kind is referred to as EDA tools.

While the advanced stage of the IC design needs several creativeness, but the low level and information part of IC design can be quite repetitive, tedious. The EDA tools facilitate the designers in doing the tasks that are tedious and repetitive tasks.

In college, students of electronics learn fundamental electronic system design with the help of small number of components called gates. Basic system can be made with less than 10 gates. By their final year, the learner will know how to make larger system which consists of up to hundreds of gates. This is not how it is prepared in the actual world.

In the actual world, a system such as the Intel Pentium 4 chip is made from 14 million gates. And with the modern trend, it will not be long before we get ahead of the one billion gates (in one chip) mark. This is so much distinct from what is thought in college. Hence, in the actual world, IC is designed using several methods.

On the very complex, a system can be described using unique languages, called hardware description language (HDL). Two mostly renowned HDLs are Verilog and VHDL. Verilog is used extensively by designers in North America, and VHDL is commonly by the European designers.

Rather than designing a system on gates level, using these languages a system is described at a complex level. After that, a software is used to decode this sophisticated description into gates level. This process is known as synthesis, and the software is mentioned as a synthesis tool. One line in HDL can be decoded by the synthesis tool into few gates. Synthesis tool is one of the models of EDA tool.

Using several EDA tools, for instance, synthesis tools, rule checkers and verification tools, today designers have been equipped to make a chip which has multi million gates in it. Excluding synthesis, there are also other EDA tools that help designers with additional process of an IC design like layout tools and timing verification tools.

The trend is to start a high abstraction using a more language, which is more abstract than the HDLs like C or C++ programming languages and allow the software to do more and more task in creating the gates. Permitting the use of C or C++ in designing a hardware system is done with the objective that it will adapt some of the software engineers become hardware designers.

Find More Electronic Design Articles