DASC standards track IP-based design trends

The IEEE design Automation Standards Committee (DASC) has historically centered its standardization efforts around language-based design for electronics. Early work in this area began with the standardization of VHDL (IEEE Std 1076) in the 1980s, followed by standardization of Verilog (IEEE Std 1364) in the 1990s. These two languages significantly changed the electronic design automation (EDA) industry by providing a common, openly available semantic description for electronic circuits. Tools for processing descriptions of circuits using these standard languages became the backbone of modern electronic design. These descriptions can be simulated to ensure correct functionality, and then synthesized to generate logic gates from the descriptions. Because the descriptions are in a common standard language, it is relatively easy to share them among multiple projects within a single company or even between companies. Because the tools for processing the descriptions are based on standard languages, there is a high degree of interoperability between such descriptions.