By Michiel Ligthart, President and COO, Verific Design Automation
2023 Will be the Year of Bespoke EDA
If 2022 was the year of bespoke silicon, formerly known as custom silicon, then it naturally follows that 2023 will be the year of bespoke EDA (electronic design automation). And like bespoke silicon, bespoke EDA is not a one size fits all methodology.
Bespoke silicon relies on bespoke EDA, a fine-tuned and tailored design flow that starts at the register transfer level (RTL) where tweaks can be made to improve the quality of a bespoken silicon design. Enhancing the flow at design entry and in-house EDA tools using domain knowledge is attractive to engineering groups because it offers them the ability to support a wide varieties of design styles as well as standards such as SystemVerilog, VHDL, UVM, UPF, and encryption. Without standards to move design content through different EDA tools, bespoke EDA would be impractical and impossible to implement. One productive advantage of bespoke EDA: Engineers need only one API for SystemVerilog and VHDL thanks to its building blocks.
Examples of bespoke EDA implementations are elusive, even though it’s common knowledge that silicon design teams are popularizing it. Then again, it’s a competitive distinction not shared outside of silicon design groups. Some educated guesses could be low-power design, design for test circuitry, intellectual property (IP) customization, and debug functionality.
