The beginnings of EDA

[Bernard Murphy]

The ACM Bulletin just provided a reminder of one of the earliest paper in EDA - a 1958 publication by Paul W. Case and others from IBM on methods to record, check and print circuit diagrams. An interesting read for anyone interested in the history of EDA

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1458043.1458067

 

[Daniel Nenni]

That is a good article. SemiWiki members can also download a PDF version of Paul's book "EDA Graffiti":

https://semiwiki.com/books/edag%20final.pdf

EDA legend Jim Hogan did the foreword...

 

[Tom Simon]

This reminds me of how a couple named Calvin and Irma started a company making products that allowed digitizing points on a plot or piece of paper to create a paper tape with the numerical coordinate data. This became Calma (CALvin & IrMA), later giving rise to GDSII and ultimately becoming part of Cadence. GDSII was a program, but is now synonymous with the STREAM file format used to archive layout data.

 

[Bernard Murphy]

Good one Tom!