Restoring the magic in design

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The emergence of “Very Large-Scale Integration (VLSI)” in the late 1970s created a groundswell of feverish innovation. Inspired by the vision laid out in Mead and Conway’s “Introduction to VLSI Design”, numerous researchers embarked on venues to unleash the capabilities offered by integrated circuit technology. The introduction of design rules, separating manufacturing from design, combined with an intermediate abstraction language (CIF) and a silicon brokerage service (MOSIS) gave access to silicon to a large population of eager designers. The magic however expanded way beyond these circuit enthusiasts and attracted a whole generation of software experts to help automate the design process, giving rise to concepts such as layout generation, logic synthesis, and silicon compilation. It is hard to overestimate the impact that this revolution has had on information technology and society at large.

About fifty years later, Integrated Circuits are everywhere. Yet, the process of creating these amazing devices feels somewhat tiring. CMOS scaling, the engine behind the evolution in complexity over all these decades, is slowing down and will most likely peter out in about a decade. So has innovation in design tools and methodologies. As a consequence, the lure of IC design and design tool development has faded, causing a talent shortage worldwide. Yet, at the same time, this moment of transition offers a world of opportunity and excitement. Novel technologies and devices, integrated into three-dimensional artifacts are emerging and are opening the door for truly transformational applications such as brain-machine interfaces and swarms of nanobots. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, and optical and quantum computing present novel models of computation surpassing the instruction-set processor paradigm. With this comes a need again to re-invent the design process, explicitly exploiting the capabilities offered by this next generation of computing systems. In summary, it is time to put the magic in design again.

Check out the DATE 2024 Call for Papers.