IBM have released a fascinating video 50 Years of EDA. It is 30 minutes long but well worth the time it takes to watch.

It starts back in 1958 with what they consider the first EDA tool, a tool for tracking engineering change orders. This is before the invention of the first integrated circuit. The video covers some of the aspects of manual design used back then. The first real technology that was developed was the LSSD test approach since they were having problems testing components for mainframes.

Very early on they developed BDLCS which was what today we call RTL but they call cycle simulation. There was a formal verification product to verify combinatorial equivalance and, of course, a simulator. They then developed a hardware accelerator which took the bring up time for a mainframe from 2 years to 6 weeks. Next was synthesis and static timing analysis, still the heart of digital design today. To resolve a crisis, the 3090 team committed to design an entire TCM (thermal conduction module) using synthesis, even though at that point it had only been used on 10 test designs.

Big problems came in the era before copper interconnect when "aluminum" (probably TiW) interconnect delays went through the roof. On a crash program they had to integrate placement and synthesis and, subsequently, routing.

What IBM calls release to manufacturing (we say DFM) required them to develop a lot of OPC and other proximity techniques.

Today they have 20,000 CPUs 24/7 doing verification. 60 hardware accelerator Engineering Verification Environments (EVE, not to be confused with the french company EVE). Release to manufacturing (RET decoration) runs on 1,000 to 10,000 cores and still takes days.

The entire EDA industry has developed similar technologies and generalized them to other processes and methodologies, but time and time again IBM was forced, by the need to develop mainframes, to pioneer these technologies, although they did them in a very proprietary way for internal use (barring one not very successful foray into the commercial market in the early 1990s).