Foundations of Electronic Design Automation Volume One: From Physics to Implementation

Modern chips contain billions of transistors. But understanding how to design them requires something most EDA books leave out: the chain of reasoning that connects physical law to working silicon.

Foundations of Electronic Design Automation: From Physics to Implementation — Volume 1 builds that chain from the ground up.

Electronic design automation is not simply a collection of software packages, commands, and design languages. Every abstraction used by an engineer—RTL, timing constraints, assertions, netlists, placement, routing, and physical verification—ultimately describes matter, charge, energy, and information operating within physical limits.

If you understand only the tool, you understand only part of the problem.

This volume begins beneath the transistor, establishing the scientific foundations on which modern electronic design depends. From there, it moves progressively upward through semiconductor devices, integrated circuits, processor architecture, hardware description, verification, synthesis, timing analysis, and physical implementation.

The objective is not command memorisation. It is engineering understanding.

You will explore:

• Atomic physics, quantum mechanics, and semiconductor physics
• Band structures, carrier transport, doping, p–n junctions, and advanced semiconductor materials
• BJTs, MOSFETs, FinFETs, gate-all-around devices, and the limits of transistor scaling
• LEDs, semiconductor lasers, quantum optics, and photonic systems
• Quantum chemistry and computational material modelling
• Superconductivity, Josephson junctions, superconducting logic, and quantum computing
• Microprocessors, integrated circuits, memory hierarchies, and IC manufacturing
• RISC-V architecture, pipelines, extensions, implementation, and verification
• HDL and RTL design principles
• Verilog, SystemVerilog, VHDL, PSL, SystemC, C++, Chisel, Clash, and GHDL
• Logic synthesis and technology mapping
• Static timing analysis and timing closure
• Functional and formal verification

But simply knowing what these technologies do is not enough.

The real question is: what evidence tells you the resulting design is actually correct?

A design is not finished because it compiles.

It is not finished because the simulation runs.

It is not finished because synthesis produces a netlist.

And it is certainly not finished because a tool reports success.

A real implementation must satisfy its specification, survive verification, respect timing and physical constraints, remain reproducible, and ultimately produce a manufacturable device whose behaviour can be defended.

That standard runs throughout this book.

You will learn to think in terms of representations, constraints, transformations, evidence, and failure modes—so that when a design breaks, you can trace the problem back through the engineering chain instead of blindly changing settings and hoping the next run passes.

This is EDA taught as an engineering discipline rather than a software tutorial.

Whether you are studying semiconductor engineering, digital design, FPGA development, verification, processor architecture, physical design, or the emerging role of AI in chip design, Volume 1 provides the foundation needed to understand how the pieces fit together.

Because the engineers who can move confidently between physics, architecture, RTL, verification, timing, and implementation possess something far more valuable than familiarity with a particular tool.

They understand the system.