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DAC Previsited
Dawn of the Design Tool Decade
Exactly 299 days before "Cramming More
Components onto Integrated Circuits" was published in
Electronics Magazine, the first workshop of the SHARE Design
Automation Project was held in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
The SHARE workshop had papers with titles like "A method
for the best geometric placement of units on a plane" and
"Design automation effects on the organization." The
magazine article began with the statement "The future of
integrated electronics is the future of electronics itself."
With such generic paper titles and such an
auspicious article intro, what has transpired since then that
has inexorably linked those two seemingly obscure technical
publication events? Pretty much everything.
15,071 days later (this coming Monday, in
fact,) the 43rd annual Design Automation Conference (DAC) will
kick-off in San Francisco, California.
The SHARE design automation workshop, held in
Atlantic City in June 1964, is now counted as DAC #1. The
Electronics Magazine article, published less than a year after
that seminal if inauspicious design automation event,
contained a small section that threw down the gauntlet to the
fledgling design automation industry:
"The complexity for minimum component
costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per
year ... Certainly over the short term this rate can be
expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term,
the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there
is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for
at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of
components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be
65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a
single wafer."
In other words – "Hang onto your
hats, design automation dudes! We integrated circuit folks may
have managed to fabricate only a 100-bit shift register with
600 transistors so far, but by the time DAC #11 rolls around in
1975, there could be almost 65,000 transistors on a chip. We
don't plan to be designing all 65,000 of them by hand, so
we're gonna need a little help from those computer programs of
yours. Beyond that, don't even think about what's going to
happen by DAC #43 in 2006. We're talking billions!"
OK, maybe Gordon Moore's words were a little
more reserved than mine, but I've had the advantage of over 40
years to think about what he wrote in that Electronics Magazine
article, and… you know… I think he might have
been onto something there. [more] |
