Looking back, looking around [electronic design automation]

During the late 1980s, there was a widespread belief that engineering workstations, widely distributed through development organizations and connected through local area networks, would become the dominant, if not the only, platform for EDA tools and electronic design. Despite early skepticism, logic synthesis began making serious inroads into the design process in the late 1980s and has now entered the mainstream. The EDA industry also focused on behavioral-level design and synthesis as a future possibility. Despite some notable efforts to develop such tools and methodologies, it is still in the research phase. Functional verification, on the other hand, has continued to rise to higher levels of design abstraction with the availability of higher-level languages and verification tools and despite the enduring controversies surrounding the standardization of these languages.