The design of integrated circuits is nowadays unthinkable without the aid of design automation tools. EDA, Electronic Design Automation, is the rapidly growing, almost four billion dollar industry. Everything made by the nearly 1 trillion electronics industry, from cellular phones, pacemakers, devices for automobiles and satellites, communication devices, computer chips, to the servers, routers and switches that run the Internet, results from designers using EDA tools and services. The gap between what current technology offers and how much of that can be used by designers is growing mostly due to tools not being able to deal with exponentially growing complexity of designs. In the design cycle designers try to model the behavior of their designs and analyze the complex interactions of millions of constituent parts in their designs to ensure completeness, correctness, optimized performance, reduced power and manufacturability of the final product. Because it is impossibly difficult, expensive and time consuming to build it first and fix it later. 
Design automation tools allow designers to achieve these goals. Designers of full custom chips, ASICs and FPGAs or EDA tool developers are usually expected to have a graduate degree. A good understanding of manufacturing technologies, design processes and basic operations of DA tools is required from the designers so they can use efficiently tools from various EDA companies. Tool developers additionally need to have excellent programming skills and deep knowledge of optimization algorithms.