The importance of CAD to electronics technology Computer-aided design (CAD) is one way of coping with the problem of how to design and build very complex systems. This problem is particularly acute in electronics technology. Designs are now (1984) said to be design-limited, rather than technology-limited. It can take months to generate a design for a chip, so that it might be obsolete before it can be manufactured. Manual design of large-scale integration (LSI) chips (circa 10,000 gates) is almost impossible. However, using current technology it is possible to produce chips having 250,000...