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I’ve noticed recently that the word ‘automation’ can be used very loosely in the EDA industry as a presumption of productivity and quality.  I’ve recenlly been working with some legacy customer flows on an IP integration process that was 100% ‘automated’ from an Excel sheet. This excel sheet was written to CSV text file which was then parsed with perl to create an RTL output.  As the solution evolved however and the requirements grew more complex,  another set of perl scripts were deployed which directly manipulated the RTL file. In fact this perl included some snippets of RTL code to insert into the output. So while technically the process was 100% automated, theis type of textmanipulation brought the level of abstraction lower even than the RTL level.  I came across similar types of 'automation' in my previous life as a design engineers life,  where automation was considered the ability to record keystrokes macros within a text editor.  Again this automation was at a very granular and low level of abstraction and consisted of no more than creating repeatable, but not very reusable small steps.  No matter the claimed level of automation of a process, a simple fact remains; automation without abstraction is like a bicycle without pedals.   

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