What will 2010 bring for verification and system-level design? The semiconductor “beasts” that need to be verified are getting more and more complex. These beasts are developed at smaller technology nodes, and with the declining number of design starts. Programmability plays a significant role, both in ASIC and ASSP designs, since users have to deal with more and more processors.
Jan 08, 2010

As today's chips cannot go into volume production without software, it is now the timeliness of software availability that determines project success and profitability. With virtual platforms, software development starts early enough to be truly parallel to hardware development. Virtual platforms also allow predictable reproduction of error cases and probing of conditions, which would be impossible to gather in the actual silicon prototype.
Nov 27, 2009

By combining the advantages of software and hardware-based development methods, system prototyping enables early and productive software development.
Oct 29, 2009

System-Level Design sat down with Frank Schirrmeister, director of product development in Synopsys’ solutions group; Ghislain Kaiser CEO of DOCEA Power: John Sanguinetti, CTO at Forte Design Systems; Vincent Perrier, Cofluent Design co-founder and director of products and marketing.
Oct 28, 2009

I remember the moment I first realized that the EDA industry was on the dawn of a major transition, in my case from gates to RTL. My colleague Robert was cursing, because he was convinced this new logic synthesis tool we had just introduced “was all wrong and couldn’t deliver.”
Sep 03, 2009

With design complexity always on the rise and an increasing amount of embedded software encapsulation in designs today, engineering teams need to be concerned with power consumption in the initial architectural design. The only way to do that is to model power consumption at the transaction level.
Aug 20, 2009

System Level Design sat down to discuss issues in system-level verification with Frank Schirrmeister, director of product development in Synopsys’ solutions group; Donald Cramb, director of professional services at Eve; Patrick Sheridan, director of marketing at CoWare, and Scott Sandler, president of SpringSoft USA. This article is one part of three and contains excerpts of that conversation. You should see all three parts of the conversation.
Jul 31, 2009

Systems such as wireless handsets include an integrated System-On-Chip (SoC) often based on a multi-core architecture, with at least one Digital Signal Processor (DSP) and one Micro Controller Unit (MCU) core. Validating the application and modem software that runs on these devices is a lengthy task. Moreover, the earlier software developers can access a realistic platform of the system, the earlier they can validate their software and ship a product. Synopsys virtual platform enables pre-silicon software development, which allows software developers to develop and test software earlier, thus reducing time-to-market. A small fee may be required.
Jul 31, 2009

At least for the last decade, we have been hearing about the worlds of embedded software and hardware growing closer, but there has been very little measurable evidence to back up those claims. Some results confirmed what market researchers had predicted: the percentage of users claiming that their overall software effort was ....
Jul 29, 2009

The 2007 edition of the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) states that “design cost is the greatest threat to the continuation of the semiconductor roadmap.” While this claim has been made even long before then, in light of the current economic situation, its meaning could not be more relevant. Given that the semiconductor industry has been through economic cycles before, however, the ITRS is also able to suggest a remedy. It’s called innovation!
May 28, 2009

Recent surveys show that the number one issues in car electronics are cost reduction and better collaboration across the complex automotive design chain of IP providers, semiconductor providers, subsystem suppliers and system integrators. With millions of lines of software code powering modern cars and the number of processors today already exceeding 80 (and further growing), software development becomes the critical component determining success of automotive development projects.
Apr 15, 2009

Current and future processor chips will comprise tens to thousands of cores and specialized hardware acceleration to achieve performance within power budgets. Multicore presents new challenges to programmers, including finding and implementing parallelism, dealing with debugging deadlocks and race conditions (that is, conditions that occur when one or more software tasks attempt to access shared program variables without proper synchronization), and eliminating performance bottlenecks.
Apr 01, 2009

System-level design is all about thinking early and implementing later. So why not apply what we already know? We even have statistics. Fifteen years ago, I was part of projects where we measured how effective methods like manual code inspection were in preventing bugs from propagating into the next project phase.
Mar 11, 2009

Recent market research indicates the development effort for software running on 90nm chip designs has already surpassed the effort of the hardware development. The projection for 2011 is less than 40% of the chip development cost is spent on hardware. Software now dominates project cycles and determines when a chip can get into volume production.
Feb 24, 2009

The debate about design at the electronic system level (ESL) seems to be in full swing again. Some claim there is too much “stuff” in ESL and basically suggest incremental approaches. Others say that today’s approaches aren’t visionary enough and are calling for the “real ESL to please stand up.”
Feb 12, 2009

Recently there has been quite some discussion at conferences and in the blogosphere about system-level design, specifically around the term electronic system level (ESL). The buzz mostly centers around which technologies should be considered part of ESL.
Jan 21, 2009

SystemC: Now open for embedded software. This article reviews the key technology components of the SystemC TLM-2.0 specification and their impact on embedded software designers using virtual platforms.
Dec 09, 2008

Over the last couple of years the new reality has set in that software development is becoming increasingly important because it determines both the cost and the associated chip-design schedule.
Sep 30, 2008

Design for low power is equally important to optimizing energy consumption, especially in mobile devices. While power is a measurement at a specific point in time, its limits clearly define which functions in a design can run in parallel.
Aug 01, 2008

For about a decade, the design community has been working toward enabling pre-silicon software development through the virtualization of embedded hardware into so-called "virtual platforms."
Jun 24, 2008

If you talk to vendors of electronic system-level (ESL) design tools, you’ll find that many have a unique approach to this evolving technology. Some vendors talk of virtual platforms,
May 12, 2008

During the past three decades, the mainstream design entry for semiconductor-design has steadily evolved from layout, to transistors, to gates, and, most recently, to the register-transfer level (RTL).
May 12, 2008

Even though the phrase “electronic system-level design” (ESL) is only a few years old, the promise of being able to do high-level design, push a button and output both the system software and a gate-level netlist has been the siren song of designers for at least a decade.
May 10, 2008

Looking back over the past 10 years or so, semiconductor process technology more or less kept pace with the demand for functionality in large-scale processor-based ICs.
Apr 24, 2008