What the Hell is ESL?
"Enigmatic Software L______?"

The tool category known as “Kitchen Appliances” covers a wide gamut of capabilities. Kitchen appliances range from general-purpose, universally useful tools such as heat sources, to highly specialized, perhaps less-than-indispensable technologies like “in-the-egg scramblers”. If someone tells you that his or her tool is a kitchen appliance, you haven’t really gained any useful information about its utility for your particular application.

The design tool category known as “ESL” has similar characteristics. When someone tries to sell you an ESL tool, it’s never quite clear what you’re getting. Will this thing revolutionize my design process, fix me coffee in the morning, or drag like dirty weighted chains across the deck of my design team’s ship until we figure out that we were more productive the old-fashioned way and throw it overboard?

For over a decade, ESL has been the leftover, catch-all category for electronic design automation (EDA). Even the abbreviation itself is malformed – “Electronic System Level” …electronic-system-level what? It’s a dangling modifier with no object. Peel away the party hat and plastic Groucho Marx glasses and we find our tattered and tarnished old friend “ESDA” (Electronic System Design Automation – at least it was a complete acronym). About ten years ago, ESDA got a bad reputation for being ambiguous and useless, so marketing mavens deep inside the EDA dungeons dressed it up, slipped on a cheap disguise, and “ESL” was born. [more]