tag: ESL

The Architect’s Dilemma And Closing The Loop With Implementation
By Frank Schirrmeister - 06 Apr, 2023 - Comments: 0

Gordon Moore has left a mark on our industry. Moore's Law has shaped decades of development. The EDA industry has been moving up the layers of abstraction to increase the productivity and predictability of design flows in our efforts to address the ever-increasing complexity of semiconductors and electronics developments. I had written about it in "Chasing The Next Level Of Productivity" not lo... » read more

RISC-V Disrupting EDA
By Brian Bailey - 23 Mar, 2023 - Comments: 3

The electronic design automation (EDA) industry started in the 1980s and primarily was driven by the test and PCB industries. The test industry was focused on simulation so that test vector sets could be developed and optimized. The PCB industry needed help managing complexity as system sizes grew. That complexity soon was eclipsed by IC complexity and the costs associated with making a mist... » read more

Toward Domain-Specific EDA
By Brian Bailey - 26 Sep, 2022 - Comments: 0

More companies appear to be creating custom EDA tools, but it is not clear if this trend is accelerating and what it means for the mainstream EDA industry. Whenever there is change, there is opportunity. Change can come from new abstractions, new options for optimization, or new limitations that are imposed on a tool or flow. For example, the slowing of Moore's Law means that sufficient prog... » read more

The End Of Closed EDA
By Brian Bailey - 22 Sep, 2022 - Comments: 0

In a previous life, I was a technologist for a large EDA company. One of my primary responsibilities in that position involved talking to a lot of customers to identify their pain points, and what new tools we could develop that would ease their problems. You would think that would be an easy task, but it certainly was not the case. For example, if you ask a developer what their biggest frus... » read more

The Next Incarnation Of EDA
By Brian Bailey - 25 Aug, 2022 - Comments: 0

The EDA industry has incrementally addressed issues as they arise in the design of electronic systems, but is there about to be a disruption? Academia is certainly seeing that as a possibility, but not all of them see it happening for the same reason. The academic community questioned the future of EDA at the recent Design Automation Conference. Rather than EDA as we know it going away, they... » read more

The Challenge Of Optimizing Chip Architectures For Workloads
By Brian Bailey - 12 May, 2022 - Comments: 1

It isn't possible to optimize a workload running on a system just by looking at hardware or software separately. They need to be developed together and intricately intertwined, an engineering feat that also requires bridging two worlds with have a long history of operating independently. In the early days of computing, hardware and software were designed and built by completely separate team... » read more

Steering The Semiconductor Industry
By Brian Bailey - 26 Aug, 2021 - Comments: 2

Progress in semiconductors has been one of the most successful engineering feats, and the industry has ridden an exponential curve longer than anything else in history. It is also a highly conservative industry that has pushed away many disruptive changes in favor of small incremental changes that minimize risk. There have been significant changes over the decades, and they often required a ... » read more

A Price To Be Paid
By Brian Bailey - 27 May, 2021 - Comments: 1

Ancient wisdom says you should be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it. This was certainly true many times during my career within EDA, and I am sure it is still happening today. Sometimes the outcome was not what was wanted, or the price was higher than expected. As an example, consider VHDL, the language that was meant to correct the problems of Verilog. One of the probl... » read more

Big Design, IP and End Market Shifts In 2020
By Brian Bailey - 30 Jan, 2020 - Comments: 0

EDA is on a roll. Design starts are up significantly thanks to increased investment in areas such as AI, a plethora of new communications standards, buildout of the Cloud, the race toward autonomous driving and continued advancements in mobile phones. Many designs demand the latest technologies and push the limits of complexity. Low power is becoming more than just reducing wasted power at t... » read more

Applications, Ecosystems And System Complexity Will Be Key Verification Drivers For 2020
By Frank Schirrmeister - 19 Dec, 2019 - Comments: 0

In my predictions blog last year, I focused on verification throughput and its expected growth in 2019. The four areas I predicted we’d see growth in during 2019 were scalable performance, unbound capacity including cloud enablement, smart bug hunting and multi-level abstractions. In 2018, the five key verification drivers that I identified were security, safety, application specificity, proc... » read more

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