Experiences on the road from EDA developer to designer to educator

Abstract

This paper will coin some concepts that came to being as an engineer once made a journey from EDA developer of a behavioral synthesis tool to RTL designer and then on to academia. The EDA developer in disguise of logic designer found comfort in writing Perl scripts writing out Verilog. He defended this unorthodox practice with buzzwords of "semi-automation", "RTL generators", and "manual behavioral synthesis" (MBS). Then, the design engineer in disguise of a professor taught his students what he did best and called it "hardware design patterns". The paper includes examples of where these concepts (especially MBS) were used, along with references to others' uses of semi-automation.