Cool Verification

Building a computer with enough horsepower to handle this important task was a largely manual effort at the time. It also took up quite a bit of space (4 rooms, according to Pat)!  First, engineers would create schematics for a module describing how a circuit should behave.  Several modules were eventually placed together in a “pizza tray” after appropriate placement was determined.  Unlike today’s modern design environments where we can build test benches or use formal tools to verify our designs, engineers at the time relied on design reviews with peers to find issues in schematics before they were sent off to another team to be placed and routed.  After the schematics were developed, it took another 16-18 weeks to create an individual board, followed by another 10 weeks of debug.  Ouch! Besides the obvious problem of not being able to run simulations in advance of actually building the device, there was the problem of applying design rules to the placement and routing of individual modules.  With actual wires crisscrossing the board one can imagine the problems that could occur if rules were not followed.

The now-obvious question that occurred to Pat and engineers at other companies at the time was, “What if a computer program could be written to automate the work currently being done by hand?” In theory, the computer ought to be able to do a better job, if only it was possible to enter the design into the computer in the first place. 

Pat used an IBM 704 mainframe computer (see user’s guide here, complete with the BESYS operating system) and worked with a team to develop a program written in Fortran to create the automated place and route tool BLADES – the Bell Labs Automated Design System.  BLADES eventually helped cut the time spent creating and debugging a board from 6 months to 6 weeks, and included a pseudo-language to allow schematics to be described in a way readable by computer.

BLADES took about 4 hours to do an automated place and route, including:

• 1.5 hours to do 800-2000 placement iterations
• 1.5-2 hours to do the routing for the chosen placement

During his work on creating BLADES, Pat “became obsessed with the whole concept of [Electronic Design Automation].”  As circuits were generated by BLADES the results were saved on tapes. Those tapes eventually and serendipitously made up a component library. 

According to Pat, he met regularly with Joe Behar, a mathematician from IBM who was working on similar problems from a much different perspective. At some point, they realized it would be useful to get together with a larger group of engineers who were also working on the same problem.  Pistilli and Behar organized a Birds of a Feather session at the 1962 IEEE workshop in Miami [1] which lead to the creation of the first DAC in 1964. According to Pistilli, he was at a planning meeting for the first DAC on the day Kennedy was assassinated (November 22, 1963). Marie and Pat put up the money for the first DAC and went on to host 136 attendees (making a profit in the process).  By 1966 in New Orleans, there were approximately 650 attendees [2]. By comparison, the largest DAC to date was the 1998 DAC in San Francisco, which had 21,659 total attendees [1].

Other interesting facts:

• 1968 was the first year DAC had sponsors.
• The 19th DAC in 1982 was the first with exhibits.
• Of the first 7 companies exhibiting at DAC, only Mentor Graphics and HP are still around with their original names.
• Marie and Pat founded MP Associates to run the conference. Today, their son-in-laws Kevin Lepine and Lee Wood are co-presidents of the company.
• MP Associates organized the first Euro-DAC in 1992, which later merged with Euro-ASIC and the European Design and Test Conference (ED&TC) to form Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) conference. Euro-DAC was modeled it after DAC. MP Associates does not organize the conference currently.
• DAC got 682 paper submissions and selected 148 papers this year. Authors of rejected papers get feedback on how they can improve, and Pat estimates that many of these papers are enhanced and then resubmitted to other conferences.

I have to admit – it was fascinating listening to Pat describe his early engineering work and subsequently his and Marie’s efforts supporting DAC.  The question that came to mind, though, was how could the lessons of the past be applied to today, and to those engineers just getting started in the EDA industry. I also wondered if the technical side of DAC has drifted too far away from the industry focus present in the early years of the conference to focus on “academia and algorithms”, as Pat described it. 

Those of you who spent your time in the exhibition hall may not have noticed, but there was a “secret” conference going on in parallel – the academic conference. I got a glimpse of this “academic DAC” on Tuesday at the CEDA luncheon where Dr. Jeannette M. Wing, assistant director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), was the keynote speaker.  On the other hand, DVCon tends to be strictly focused on industry trends and solutions to real-life problems.  

According to Pat, DAC added a user track some years back to try to address the problem of a growing academic influence to the conference.  I still wonder though, given I found little desire or need to venture off of the exhibit floor, whether the user track is enough to really push the conference back to its industrial roots.

Another issue that I was hoping for some perspective on was that of future directions – that is to say, what is coming down the road for people relatively new to the EDA industry?  Pat felt that miniaturization and microwaves were two technology trends to watch in the years ahead.  Of course, the elephant in the room for engineers in EDA is the persistent fear that we may be in a dying industry.  But Pat begs to differ: “No matter what happens, you have to design things,” he said.  You’re also “going to have to have tools.”  That would seem to bode well for EDA.  However, Pat ended with a word of caution. “If we don’t stay together, we’re going to fall behind.” 

So, how do we stick together to hold our ground against the crashing waves of the global economy and changes in technology?  I started my blog back in 2005 with the hope that engineers within companies would be encouraged to do a better job communicating.  Flash forward to 2009, where the Conversation Central discussions, blog postings, and #46DAC tweets going on throughout the week were a constant reminder of the ever-increasing need and desire of engineers to communicate across global and corporate boundaries. By remembering the past, refocusing DAC on its industrial and problem-solving roots, and enhancing engineering coordination and communication via new social-media technologies, DAC can help the industry move on to bigger and brighter days ahead.

Additional Sources and Comments

[1] Goering, Richard. “At 40, signs of age-and youth”, EETimes, June 2, 2003

[2] Pistilli says there were 136 people, Goering in [1] says 137. Pistilli suggests there were 650 attendees at the 1966 DAC, Goering in [1] says there were 636.