Conference Report: Hierarchical Design Stressed at Design Automation Conference

Until recently the general attitude of engineers to design automation was confused–they questioned its value yet deplored its limited availability. To increase the amount of DA knowledge in the public domain, the 15th in the series of Annual Design Automation Conferences was held June 19-21 at Caesar´s Palace, Las Vegas. Due either to this enlightened choice of venue or to spreading paranoia over handling VLSI designs, this year´s conference was extremely well attended–650 delegates, an increase of 50 percent over last year. However, for those expecting ing to learn of new tools for survival in technologies governed by Moore´s Laws, this conference may have been somewhat disappointing. It was largely more of the same–PWB layout, testing, IC layout, design languages, logic design, simulation, CAM, and graphics.