Opinion: The yin and yang of designing big chips

In thinking about this viewpoint, it occurred to me that a good place to start is with the EDA industry itself –– what characterizes it, for example? It strikes me that in EDA we are quite different as an industry compared to, say, the medical industry, especially in terms of speed of innovation. If a person in academia dreams up an EDA idea, it can be implemented, tested to ensure that it works, and put on the market reasonably quickly.

However, the proof needed to demonstrate that an EDA innovation works reliably is somewhat less rigorous than the testing and approvals process that medicine and medical technology needs to go through –– and with good reason. This is chiefly because the medical industry deals with people, which make the consequences of something going wrong far more serious.

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