In the early stages of the EDA industry, workstation automation companies referred to these in the same breath. CAD is the hardware and software tools used by engineers to design and verify new electronic systems. Chip Another term for an integrated circuit, microchip or semiconductor. Component One element of a larger system. A hardware component can be a device as small as a transistor or as large as a disk drive as long as it is part of a larger system.
Software components are segments within a larger system.
The process of a chip design from concept to production. Therefore, most electronic products found today are digital, rather than analog. DSP Digital Signal Processor. DSP chips are widely used in sound cards, fax machines, modems, cellular phones, high-capacity hard disks and digital TVs. DSP chips are used in sound cards for recording and playback and speech synthesis.