What does Cadence mean when it calls System Realization a "holistic" approach to IC design?

By _EDA360 Insider

October 28, 2010

Yesterday, Cadence introduced a holistic approach to IC design that the company calls Silicon Realization. I’m already fielding questions from my friends about what “holistic” means in this context and what’s new about all this. When Cadence uses the term “holistic,” it means an entire tool chain that revolves around three critical requirements: unified design intent, abstraction, and convergence. “Design intent” includes representations of functional, physical, and electrical characteristics with the requirement that these representations be consistent throughout the implementation and verification tool sets; that they span the various abstraction levels used to represent the design; and that all members of the IC design team can easily make use of the representations at all design levels.