Automation in the Design Workflow

Most high frequency electronic design automation (EDA) tools consist of two main components: an element which describes a circuit or physical structure, for example a netlist, and an element that solves for the electrical response, for example a simulation engine. In the early days of EDA, these components were transparent to end users; an engineer might hand-type a netlist and then submit that to a simulation engine which produced a result. However, this process was time consuming, tedious and error prone. Over time, these tools evolved to have sophisticated, feature-rich interfaces which enabled users to describe and visualize increasingly complex circuits and structures. The tools make engineers more productive, however, they are increasingly becoming walled off ecosystems which limit access to the elemental machinery upon which they are based. Today, engineers want to build state of the art workflows which go beyond EDA software, for example, they may want to incorporate measurement or use third party tools and technologies, augmented with Artificial intelligence (AI). In this context, the extensive user interfaces and all-encompassing EDA platforms become an unwanted burden. Large Language Model-AI tools cannot easily control a human-centric, user interface-based platform – it is much more straightforward for to generate a script which represents a schematic or controls a simulation engine. In response, some EDA vendors are “opening up” part of their toolsets through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This talk will cover real life examples of workflows and engineering applications where EDA automation and customization are dramatically increasing productivity and changing the way engineers and computers interact. Keysight Hardware and Software tools will illustrate representative examples.