Looking for Mr. "Turnkey"

With the challenges of VLSI forever pressing the designer to increase productivity while remaining at a constant resource level, the market place has been inundated with an onslaught of front-end design tools to ease the designer\´s current burdens. The pervasiveness of these "new" design tools in the engineer\´s environment has, in actuality, fallen far shy of expectations. This paper will attempt to analyze the reasons why the ideals of a complete turnkey system, as presented at conferences, and the reality of the current systems, as actually seen by the designer, are still divergent.