Introduction to Design Automation
This course is an introduction to design automation, concerned with rigorous methods and tools for the modeling, design, and analysis of complex engineered systems. Topics include design flows, discrete and continuous modeling techniques, and fundamental synthesis, verification, and simulation algorithms. Integrated circuit design will be used as a central example, augmented by examples from cyber-physical systems and software design. Laboratory assignments and a class project will expose students to state-of-the-art languages and tools.
Topics
- Students will learn to: Identify and leverage appropriate formalisms and modeling techniques to specify different types of systems and represent different abstraction layers in a design. Define appropriate abstraction layers and mathematical formulations of synthesis, verification, and validation problems in the context of integrated circuit design. Define, describe, and implement fundamental analysis and synthesis algorithms at the core of electronic design automation (EDA) and, more broadly, computer-aided design of complex engineered systems, adopted in research and industry. Identify the characteristics of different modeling paradigms and abstraction mechanisms in terms of expressiveness, analyzability, synthesizability, and tractability. Practice with a range of state-of-the-art design automation tools and their underlying methods to address modeling, analysis, and design problems motivated by research as well as industrial applications. Especially at the graduate level, perform scholarly research in the design of integrated circuits and complex engineered systems by either developing new approaches and algorithms or by exploring the application of the techniques learned in class to new domains or design problems.
Official catalogue course objectives and student learning outcomes
Prerequisites & course information
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Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026-2027