Electronic Design Automation and IEEE SA OPEN
Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry has long embraced open-source before it was a term. Circuit analysis tools like SPICE became popular at the dawn of EDA by code-sharing academics. Industry joined with governments to promote digital design language standards that resulted in the IEEE 1076™ (VHDL) in the 1980s. The VHDL standard was flexible to promote further concepts to standardize on logic types and more. Much of these concepts are VHDL source code that was either embedded into a standard or made available for simple download. With the IEEE’s introduction of IEEE SA Open, the VHDL team has been able to migrate its codebase to adopt best open-source development practices. VHDL is just one of the EDA standards where open-source is important and the IEEE SA Open platform is just beginning to be adopted for many other design automation needs. We will explore how IEEE SA Open will benefit academia and industry for new and evolving EDA standards.
