Comprehensive Guide to Electronic Design Automation (EDA): Tools, Techniques, and Applications

About Course

Electronic Design Automation (EDA) plays a crucial role in modern electronic system design, enabling engineers to develop complex integrated circuits (ICs), printed circuit boards (PCBs), and embedded systems with precision and efficiency. This course provides a comprehensive introduction to EDA, covering fundamental design methodologies, essential toolchains, and cutting-edge advancements in AI-driven automation. Whether you’re a beginner or a professional looking to deepen your understanding, this course will equip you with the skills and hands-on experience needed to navigate the evolving landscape of EDA.

Throughout this course, you’ll explore design flows for digital, analog, and FPGA systems, while gaining practical experience with open-source EDA tools such as Yosys, OpenROAD, ngspice, GTKWave, and KiCad. You’ll learn about circuit simulation, logic synthesis, physical design automation, and verification techniques, culminating in advanced topics like low-power design, system-level co-design, and AI-driven automation. Each module includes interactive quizzes, assignments, and real-world case studies to reinforce learning.

By the end of this course, you will have a solid grasp of EDA methodologies and tools, allowing you to apply your knowledge to IC design, PCB layout, FPGA development, and semiconductor manufacturing. You’ll also be prepared to leverage emerging technologies in AI/ML-driven design automation. Whether you’re an aspiring hardware engineer, chip designer, or embedded systems developer, this course will provide you with the expertise to excel in the rapidly advancing field of electronic design. 🚀

Understand the fundamentals of EDA tools and methodologies.
✅ Explore low-power design techniques for energy-efficient systems.
✅ Master system-level design and hardware-software co-design.
✅ Learn how AI & ML are transforming circuit design and fault detection.
✅ Gain hands-on experience with open-source EDA tools like OpenROAD, Yosys, and SystemC.
✅ Discover strategies for design for manufacturability (DFM) in chip and electronic system design.
✅ Apply timing, functional, and formal verification to validate your designs.
✅ Work on a real-world capstone project to build a functional electronic system.

Course Content

Module 1: Introduction to EDA
This module kicks off by defining Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and mapping its scope across modern chip- and board-level workflows. You’ll learn why EDA tools—from schematic capture to gate-level simulation—are indispensable for accelerating design cycles, improving consistency, and catching errors early. We’ll explore abstraction levels (behavioral, RTL, gate, physical) and survey both commercial and open-source toolchains, ending with a quiz to test your grasp of EDA’s core concepts and the challenges these tools address.

Lesson 1.1 – Overview of Electronic Design Automation (EDA)
00:00
Definition and scope of Electronic Design Automation.
00:00
Lesson 1.2 – Design Abstraction Levels
Lesson 1.3 – EDA Toolchain & Open-Source Tools
Importance of EDA tools and methodologies in improving design efficiency, reducing time-to-market, and ensuring design reliability.
00:00
Key challenges addressed by EDA tools.
00:00
Introduction to EDA – Multiple Choice Quiz

Module 2: Design Flows & Methodologies
Here we dive into the structured “flows” that guide designers from idea to silicon or FPGA bitstream. You’ll see how a digital flow—starting with RTL, moving through synthesis, place & route, timing closure, and back–annotation—differs from analog/mixed-signal flows (schematic → simulation → layout → parasitic extraction) as well as from FPGA-centric flows. Real-world examples using open-source toolchains illustrate key pain points and optimization strategies at each stage.

Additional Material: Design Flows

Additional Material: FPGA Design Flow

Circuit Simulation and Analysis
Circuit simulation and analysis lie at the heart of Electronic Design Automation, enabling engineers to predict how analog, digital, and mixed-signal circuits will behave before hardware ever materializes. By leveraging SPICE-based tools, designers can perform DC, AC, and transient analyses to verify operating points, frequency response, and time-domain switching behavior. Advanced EDA environments integrate parameter sweeps, Monte Carlo tolerance analysis, and temperature-variation studies to uncover corner-case failures, while harmonic balance and electromagnetic solvers tackle RF and high-speed interconnect phenomena. Together, these techniques provide the confidence needed to meet performance, stability, and regulatory requirements without costly silicon respins.

Module 3: EDA Tools & Methodologies
Building on flow knowledge, this module examines the specialized tools that populate each stage: SPICE-based circuit simulators for timing and noise analysis, synthesis engines that translate RTL into optimized gates, physical-design suites for floorplanning and routing, and verification environments that combine functional simulation, formal checks, and coverage metrics. You’ll understand how these components interoperate to ensure that your design not only works functionally but meets performance, area, and power targets.

Additional Material: Verification and Validation

Additional Material: Physical Design Automation

Module 4: Advanced Topics in EDA
Once the basics are mastered, we tackle cutting-edge challenges: low-power techniques that manage multi-voltage domains and clock-gating, design-for-manufacturability practices to improve yield in nanoscale processes, and system-level co-design that tightly integrates hardware and software components. We’ll also survey how AI and machine learning are beginning to automate layout, optimize timing, and predict failure modes—offering a glimpse of the algorithm-driven EDA of tomorrow.

Final Module: Course Conclusion & Resources
In our wrap-up, we revisit the key takeaways—from abstraction strategies to advanced low-power and AI-driven automation—and point you toward open-source repositories, webinars, and advanced courses to keep your skills current. A short capstone assignment challenges you to apply the full EDA flow to a real-world design problem, and a final quiz ensures you’re ready to leverage EDA tools in industry or research.

About Course

What Will You Learn?

Course Content

Lesson 1.1 – Overview of Electronic Design Automation (EDA)

Definition and scope of Electronic Design Automation.

Lesson 1.2 – Design Abstraction Levels

Lesson 1.3 – EDA Toolchain & Open-Source Tools

Importance of EDA tools and methodologies in improving design efficiency, reducing time-to-market, and ensuring design reliability.

Key challenges addressed by EDA tools.

Introduction to EDA – Multiple Choice Quiz

Lesson 2.1 – Overview of Design Flows

Lesson 2.2 – Digital Design Flow (with Open-Source Tools) with Example

Lesson 2.3 – Analog & Mixed-Signal (AMS) Design Flow with Example

Lesson 2.4 – FPGA Design Flow (with Open-Source FPGA Tools)

Detailed explanation of the digital design flow.

Module 2: Design Flows & Methodologies

Additional Material: Design Flows

Introduction to different design flows and their characteristics.

Sequential and parallel design flows.

Importance of design flow optimization for efficient design.

RTL design, verification, synthesis, place and route, and timing analysis.

Use of EDA tools in each stage of the digital design flow.

Specific challenges in analog and mixed-signal design flow.

Description of different stages, such as schematic capture, simulation, layout, and parasitic extraction.

Integration of EDA tools in analog and mixed-signal design.

Additional Material: FPGA Design Flow

Overview of the FPGA design flow.

Design entry, synthesis, place and route, and programming.

Utilization of EDA tools for FPGA design and verification.

Overview of circuit simulation techniques.

SPICE simulation, transient analysis, AC analysis, and DC analysis.

Advanced simulation techniques and EDA tools for circuit analysis.

Overview of the EDA toolchain and its components.

Description of various tools used at different stages of the design flow.

Lesson 3.1 – Circuit Simulation & Analysis

Lesson 3.2 – Logic Synthesis & Optimization

Lesson 3.3 – Physical Design Automation

Lesson 3.4 – Verification & Validation

EDA Tools & Methodologies – Multiple Choice Quiz

Additional Material: Verification and Validation

Importance of verification and validation in the design process.

Introduction to functional and formal verification techniques.

Coverage analysis, assertion-based verification, and EDA tools for verification.

Additional Material: Physical Design Automation

Physical design flow and its stages.

Floorplanning, placement, and routing algorithms.

Utilization of EDA tools for physical design automation.

Lesson 4.1 – Low-Power Design

Lesson 4.2 – Design for Manufacturability (DFM) in Chip Design & Electronic Systems

Lesson 4.3 – System-Level Design & Co-Design

Lesson 4.4 – AI & Machine Learning in EDA

Multiple Choice Quiz : Advanced Topics in EDA

Recap & Key Takeaways

Future Trends in EDA

Application of AI and ML techniques in EDA.

EDA tools leveraging AI/ML for design automation.

Final Quiz : Advanced Topics in EDA

Additional Resources: Open-Source Projects, Webinars & Online Courses

Lesson: Capstone Assignment – Real-World EDA Challenge

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