The design field as a part of its natural progression has moved from one set of tools to another. Each migration was forced on the community by the exploding design complexity.
This transition can be charted out as follows.
- The pen and paper era.
- The Spice netlist and layout Editor Era.
- The RTL Era.
- The Verification Era.
- The System Era (Now running in a design center near you)
Various EDA tool vendor's have been trying for decades to kickstart the System Design Era. Their efforts are littering the roadmap under various names like Behavioral compiler, Superlog etc.
The Systems Era has now taken a new name the hype is now about ESL. Will this pig fly? or is it another graveyard o the roadmap?
