How then shall we design? - Design database technologies and why designers should care

The design tools and their databases impact the way circuits are designed and a new approach to electronic design automation (EDA) that provides a solution to the design problems facing the industry are discussed. Design flow is a description of the steps to realize a design and transforms the possible implementations into a specific implementation that the design team creates. This transformation from manual to automated design flows has been so pervasive that design automation has become the design flow. The unified data model (UDM) is the solution to some of concurrent engineering (CE) implementation challenges. The UDM is a true design paradigm shift, which takes on the added responsibility of defining and managing the relationships among the data and events. The UDM, more than a database, manages and coordinate and coordinates events and solves both the interface and semantic problems of CE.