Trailblazing Physical Design Flows: Ralph Otten's Impact on Design Automation

Abstract

Engineering is the science of converting theory into practice. It is also the "art" of technical design. Among all engineering disciplines semiconductor electronic design has pushed the limits of true design automation far further than any other technical discipline. Armies of engineers were needed to design the Airbus A380, yet it is morphologically identical to a Boeing 747 designed using slide rulers 50 years ago. Contrast that to IC designers who build a billion-component chip from idea to hardware in just a few months. And they do that while the scale of the design reliably doubles every 2 years. Enabling this unprecedented degree of electronic design automation are a set of algorithms chained together as a flow that crosses several design abstractions down to a physical circuit mask pattern. During his illustrious career Ralph Otten's ideas and vision have shaped design automation in significant ways: by contributing algorithms and by defining methodologies to safely cross abstraction levels using automated tools. Ralph Otten's career parallels the development of circuit design flows from birth to mature flows. He developed the very first floorplan representations and worked on the very first logic synthesis flows (then called a "silicon compiler"). As director of education Ralph has set new directions, celebrating the strong points of the broader Electrical Engineering discipline. This presentation will address the the impact he has putting putting EDA on the map as an engineering discipline with a solid theoretical foundation. As a result, visionary-yet-small university projects matured into a coherent industrial-strength tools flows.