Chairman greeting

Kazuhiro Takahashi, EDA Technical Committee Chair

 LSI’s are used in various things such as home electrical appliances, computers, and automobiles, and are therefore indispensable for the recent social infrastructure. In the example of application for automobiles, they began controlling the fundamental functions of ‘Driving’, ‘Stopping’, and ‘Turning’, hence high reliability is strongly required.
 Especially, great deal of expectation is put in the development of techniques for highly-reliable design under short design time and minimal resources conditions, timing design and verification considering process variation, low-power design and power verification. These technological advances can only be realized if we work closely with the domestic semiconductor industry, universities, and the government and strengthen cooperation with related industries and organizations at global scale.

 The EDA Technical Committee is involved in promoting technologies related to the EDA of electronic devices as part of the activities of JEITA (the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association). Our main activity consists in studying system LSI design technologies; by investigating technologies related to the EDA field and encouraging standardization, we aim at providing support to related industries both domestically and around the world. The three main activities carried out by the EDA Technical Committee are:

(1) Investigating recent trends in EDA technologies, examining problems related to the trends, and proposing solutions.
 This year, activities are driven by two WGs: the Nano-Scale Physical Design WG (Nano-WG) and the LSI-Package-Board Co-design WG (LPB-WG). The Nano-WG investigates trends in design technologies and EDA technologies for next-generation physical design, and proposes solutions to the problems encountered. The LPB-WG acts busily to have standardization authorize the LPB format proposed in 2011. Results of these activities will be actively presented to the public through meetings via related agencies and organizations, open presentations in conferences, and via the annual reports issued by EDA-TC.

(2) Contributing to the standardization of EDA technologies.
 We strengthened our standardization effort by assigning the standardization activities that used to be conducted by the EDA Standardization Technical Sub- Committee to the EDA-TC directly. This led to the creation of a new standardization commissioner position.
 We will keep working with the IEEE/DASC (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers/Design Automation Standards Committee). Beyond our participation to DASC meetings at the DAC (June) and DVCON (March) in the United States, we will also hold DASC meetings in Japan at the SystemC Japan seminar (July).
 The Nano-WG and LPB-WG will take part in standardization activities as well. Though standardization activities in the SystemC/SystemVerilog/Power Format WGs are not planned this year, we will provide feedback to the IEEE if needed.

(3) Organizing and supporting events to promote EDA technologies and standards.
 We will promote EDA technologies and standards through well-known events such as Embedded Technology.

EDA-TC is committed to contributing to the development of design technologies and to the growth of the semiconductor industry in Japan through all these activities.