Electronic design automation

Electronic design automation (EDA) is the use of software to design, simulate, verify, and prepare electronic systems for manufacture. Its tools manage complex interactions among circuit behavior, physical layout, and fabrication constraints.

Hardware description language: A programming language used to describe the structure or behavior of digital hardware. Designers use these languages to describe circuits that EDA tools synthesize and verify.
Boolean algebra: An algebraic system whose variables take truth values and whose operations include conjunction, disjunction, and negation. It supplies the logic that synthesis tools simplify and map into digital circuits.
Integrated circuit: An electronic circuit fabricated as interconnected components on a semiconductor substrate. Chip design is a central EDA workload, from logic specification through manufacturing layout.
Manual circuit design: The creation and refinement of electronic circuits through direct human analysis and drawing rather than automated design flows. EDA replaces much repetitive manual work but still depends on designers to set goals and resolve tradeoffs.
Logic synthesis: The transformation of a hardware description into a network of logic gates or other implementation elements. It converts behavioral or logical descriptions into structures suitable for physical implementation.
Transistor: A semiconductor device that controls current flow and can act as an electronic switch or amplifier. Transistors are the physical elements whose behavior chip-design tools ultimately approximate and arrange.
Printed circuit board: A board that mechanically supports and electrically connects electronic components through patterned conductive layers. PCB design tools arrange components and traces while checking electrical and manufacturing constraints.
Electronic system-level design: The specification and exploration of electronic systems at a higher abstraction level than individual registers or gates. It moves design decisions above the detailed implementation stages commonly associated with EDA.
Static timing analysis: A method for checking whether signal paths in a digital circuit meet timing requirements without simulating input sequences. EDA tools use it to find paths that cannot meet a design's clock constraints.
SPICE: A family of computer programs for simulating the electrical behavior of circuits. Circuit simulators provide detailed analyses of analog behavior that higher-level design steps depend on.

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