(1) (
Electronic
Design
Automation) Using the computer to design, lay out, verify and simulate the performance of electronic circuits on a chip or printed circuit board. While the public mostly focuses on the end products and is only moderately aware of the chips and circuits inside, without EDA, there would be nowhere near the number of electronic devices on the market today.
In the 1950s and 1960s, circuits were drawn by hand on drafting boards. During the late 1960s and 1970s, computer-aided design (CAD) was used to create the schematics, and computer-aided engineering (CAE) was used to analyze the designs. In the mid-1980s, all the CAD and CAE tools for electronic circuits coalesced into the term "electronic design automation." Today, Synopsys, Cadence and Mentor Graphics are the major EDA companies. See
HDL and
ATE.
(2) (
Enterprise
Data
Access) Popular middleware software from Information Builders that runs on more than 35 platforms and provides a common interface between client requests (typically a SQL query or from FOCUS) to more than 80 different database and file types as well as to CICS. It allows queries on different types of databases at the same time. Introduced in 1991, and transferred to the company's iWay Software spin-off in 2001, EDA was previously known as EDA/SQL. COM, CORBA and EJB capability is also available. See
WebFOCUS.
(3) (
Enterprise
Data
Access) Providing a uniform way to access data throughout the enterprise. It implies the ability to treat multiple, distributed databases as a single logical entity. See EDA definition (2) above and
DQbroker.