IBM has a long history of innovation in the field on electronic design automation (EDA), beginning in the 1950’s when IBM started mass-producing computers. Engineers saw the need to control and streamline production and began using early computers such as the IBM 704 to document designs and to check the correctness of the Boolean equations specifying the behavior. In the decades that followed, IBM continued facing new challenges and solving them with pioneering inventions including circuit simulation, static timing analysis, Boolean comparison, cycle simulation, hardware acceleration, logic and physical synthesis, large scale physical design, layout checking and automated testing in manufacturing.

This video, Inside IBM EDA: 50 Years of Innovation, describes some of the innovations developed at IBM through a series of interviews with a few of the original pioneers. A small team of volunteers from IBM’s EDA community created this video for an internal workshop. They are now making it available for a larger audience.