DAC at 50: The second 25 years

Today, everyone working in information-related fields is part of the 'Big Data' revolution. Data as these new scales dramatically changes the ways one interacts with technology, among other things. Breakthroughs in formal methods involve binary decision diagrams and model checking. The first moment methods are used to analyze the electrical delay of wires. The first accurate probabilistic models of switching for power estimation of logic. The first descriptions of scripting-based languages designed to create complex design flows. From the vantage point twenty years later, it is quite satisfying to see how many of these early ideas actually got real in today's tools and flows. The clear emerging area is around nanometer effects, which appear in this epoch for the first time, in a big way. The clear breakout trend, however, is the rise system design concerns, across a great range of heterogeneous platforms.