ESD Alliance Master Class: Introduction to Chip Design and Electronic Design Automation

Overview of the design of today’s complex chips with Electronic Design Automation tools.

June 25, 2025 | 10:00am-11:30am PT

Complex semiconductor chips power today’s cell phones, cars, computers, and more. This on-line Master Class will provide non-technical people who work in and around the chip design industry a high-level overview and understanding of how these complex chips are designed.

The chips powering today’s cell phones, cars, computers, and more can contain billions of transistors. Designing these chips requires a team of engineers with expertise in various aspects of the design flow, along with Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools that are needed to implement and verify these complex designs.

This Master Class is intended for non-technical staff that wish to understand the basics of semiconductor chip design. It provides an appreciation of the complex design flows and an understanding of some of the terminology used by chip design teams.

For students, the course will introduce some of the rewarding challenges and career opportunities available in the design and EDA industries.

In this class we will cover basic information about digital chips, then introduce some of the key steps and tools used during the design flow. We will also discuss some of the tradeoffs of different implementation methodologies and some of the challenges presented by various critical applications such as devices used in medical and automotive systems.