Future of EDA: Usual suspect or silent hero for successful semiconductor business?

Summary form only given. During history of semiconductor development Computer-Aided Design developed into Electronic Design Automation. Point tools provided by CAD/EDA industry were selected by industrial design flows and integrated to make use of best-in class tools available for product development. This was a useful approach to target the classical focus segments for semiconductor design: area, verification and technology enabling. During the last years additional design parameters like power optimization have been introduced successfully into industrial design flows. There is still a need to improve tools addressing these technical design constraints within the foreseeable future. Main focus of future design flows have to be on additional business constraints like overall manufacturing cost and Time-to-Volume. The world of semiconductor business has changed significantly during the last years. Product development is globally distributed. Value chain from specification to development to manufacturing is split-up over various countries and continents. Supply chain to customers requires more flexibility. Market window for most of the products is getting smaller and smaller. Design-for-Test may serve as an example for linking design and manufacturing disciplines within semiconductor development. This discipline covers design teams and test engineering. To control Time-to-Volume and Cost-of-Yield of a product, production engineering teams need effective diagnosis environment linking data bases from design, test engineering and manufacturing sites. This example shows the required borderless approach to be addressed by future EDA tools.