Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Abstract
The semantics of computer-based electronic design have become
more and more accurate over the past years from 1960 to 1985; the
label typically applied to the field was changed correspondingly
from Computer-Aided Drafting (CAD1) to Computer-Aided Design
(CAD2) to Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE). In CAE, semantics
are assigned (intensionally) to electrical component elements, and
the designer then extensionally tests the resulting, often huge,
circuits with reference to those elements.
Consistent design syntax is prerequisite to usable design
semantics: A similar requirement has been applied to natural
language in the form of the Whorf Hypothesis.
Historical Notes:
The original version of this paper was presented at the Tenth International Conference
on General Semantics, San Diego, California, in August of 1985. It later was published
in the journal, ETC: A Review Of General Semantics. I found a copy of the
manuscript among some old documents belonging to my now-deceased father, John Max
Williams, and have somewhat rewritten it here.
An historical note:
Daisy Systems, my employer in the 1980's, went defunct in about 1990. It attempted
to manufacture tools for all aspects of computer-aided engineering -- applied engineering
methodology, workstations, and software -- and consequently suffered fatal quality
errors. One of its competitors, Mentor Graphics, restricted its attention to the software
and has prospered with great success to this day.
The original Daisy facility was located in Sunnyvale, in the San Francisco Bay area,
in 1981. In about 1983, Daisy moved to a large, newly-built facility located at
Middlefield Road, Mountainview, California. This facility now is occupied by the morerecent Synopsys corporation, another presently successful software provider.
The terms intensional and extensional are derived from General Semantics and are
used here technically:
Briefly, an intensional orientation is one in which understanding and planning is
done strictly based on human thinking and logical assumptions and can lead to
misevaluation, prejudice, and failed actions. An exclusively intensional orientation
describes a form of mental illness.
By contrast, extensional orientation is based on observation of physical fact and can
lead to an insistence upon routinely repetitive details and device-driven, unusual
behavior.
The greatest advances in science have resulted from simultaneously successful
intensional and extensional orientations, with emphasis upon the latter.
---------------------------------Note: Mentor Graphics and Synopsys are trademarks of their respective companies.
Additional information on Daisy Systems may be found online. Two background articles
of use are located (as of 2015-09) at:
http://product-wisdom.com/2013/03/23/daisy-systems-an-anatomy-of-a-blunder-anecdote /
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_Systems .
Some more detail on Daisy Systems is in the Footnotes section below.
Introduction
In recent years, the exponential rate of increase of knowledge in modern society has
not been unrelated to a corresponding rate of increase in the complexity of integrated
electronic circuits. The vacuum tubes of the 1950's, components with no more than a
half-dozen distinct functions each, have been supplanted by transistorized chips. These
chips have increased in complexity from a few functions each in the early 1960's, to
hundreds of functions each in the 1970's; and to hundreds of thousands of functions each
in the early 1980's. Current chips can exceed tens of millions of functions each, with no
clear limit in sight.
How is it possible to design such devices? How can a design engineer, or a designteam of several engineers, keep track of the development of an integrated circuit
containing, say, half of a million independent logic gates?
The answer seems to be, by the process of abstraction.
Conclusion
The technological impact of computer-aided engineering has been greatest on the
design of the large logical circuits which have become commonplace. Simulation has
replaced breadboarding as an intermediate step between schematic and chip. In
practice, no one would consider wiring, say, a million components together just to test a
design. Rather, after modelling and simulation, an attempt would be made to
synthesize, lay out, and print the chip all at once. I do not discuss logic synthesis here.
The semantic importance of computer-aided engineering is that it has made possible
electronic design at a very abstract level, the design always being kept consistent with a
syntax which permits it to be tested against the reality of the known laws of electronics.
The Logician, in its day, allowed the ever-increasing demands of larger- and larger-scale
circuit integration to be met, simply by guaranteeing that the product of the designer's
ever-increasing level of abstraction would be consistent with the physical reality which a
workable circuit always must represent.
Footnotes
The standard Daisy Systems logo was
The early Logicians (~1982) were sold as a unit: A metal desk allowed a seated
engineer to operate a monochrome terminal using a keyboard and I think mouse. The
desk included an 8-inch floppy drive with a capacity of a little over 1 MB, very generous
at the time. The hardware for the proprietary operating system, maybe a half-dozen 24'
boards, was contained in a metal chassis near the floor of the desk. I have not been able
to find an internet-posted picture of this desk.
Later Daisy software versions used a Sun Microsystems chassis and unix operating
systems.