Technology ´89: design automation

Among the important developments of 1988 are the growing use of accelerators in workstations to increase the power of workstations, making them more economical, a novel midrange machine, and greater acceptance of workstations in Japan. Commercial log-synthesis products, which hit the market in 1987, have begun to be used in production environments. Mixed analog and digital chips and analog chips have continued to gain popularity, and a wave of tools for their design has appeared recently. Among the most significant are analog module generators, which use a combination of design algorithms and rules to generate small analog blocks, such as op amps, from behavioral descriptions. Designing for testability has become more important as ICs have grown more complex.<>