mohamedkassem/TSRI1
al design tools continue to dramatically improve across multiple domains, from synthesis to place androute and verification, enabling faster turnaround times for large designs and shifting the innovation focal point for designers. The core concepts of digital design still taught in many introductory very large scale integration (VLSI) classes, such as logical effort and arithmetic unit design, are, today, automated, leav ing many lowlevel decisions to a tool informed by design constraints and outside the engineer’s hands. Due to
the increase in both gates per design and productivity through automa tion, we are starting to see metrics, such as design effort and time to working silicon, compete with power, performance, and area.
Along with the slowdown in Moore’s law, we are seeing an increase in interest in more softwarerelated career paths. As shown in Figure 1, there is evidence that students are voting with their feet and moving into co