Commercial CAD: challenges and opportunities

This talk will discuss the current state of commercial CAD, and speculate upon how it might evolve in both the near and longer term. In the near term, commercial CAD will concentrate on the familiar problems of the VLSI field - completing larger designs, optimizing yield, coping with variability, and so on. These and similar well known problems, already known to customers and called out in the ITRS roadmap, will keep commercial CAD busy for the next few years.In the long term, however, there are many more possibilities. In particular, fields such as diverse as genetics and nano-technology are currently struggling to produce small but working examples, but have the potential to cheaply build very large and complex systems. As the fabrication technology in these fields matures, designers will need more automated tools, just as they have over the history of IC design. Furthermore, there will surely be large mixed systems containing more than one of these technologies, including the current electronic technology and/or its technological successors. It is therefore possible that the long term evolution of commercial CAD will encompass many fields, with a core competency of the explicit construction of large and complex systems.