ESL Languages: Which One Is Right For Your Needs?


The question about ESL language is the right one comes up over and over again.  As customers begin to understand the benefits of modeling and analysis at the system level, they must address this question as one of the first steps in getting started.   What language should be used for ESL—SystemC, SystemVerilog, UML or M? Technically, you can create an ESL/TLM platform in any language yo... » read more

The Quest For Faster Data Throughput On A Chip


By Ed Sperling As with all network topologies, the general rule is the faster the better. Jack Browne, VP of sales and marketing at Sonics, said his customers are asking for higher-speed interconnects. “Right now we’re at 300MHz,” he said. “They want to more than double that in the very near future and eventually get to 1GHz.” Getting to that speed is no simple ... » read more

Making A Multicore System Work


If you think designing a single-core system is hard, designing multicore systems is multiple times harder. Connecting all the pieces together and making them work properly, if not together, is one of the hardest tasks design engineers and architects will ever face. System-Level Design tracked down some of the experts in this field and sat them down around a table to discuss what’s going... » read more

ESL Modeling: Be Careful What You Wish For


I was talking to a customer last week about his most recent ESL activities and he brought up a question that I’ve heard from many different sources : “How accurate does my ESL model need to be?” The level of timing accuracy, and even function accuracy, needed for effective system level analysis is a very dynamic question, with different answers for different organizations, and even di... » read more

What’s Next In ESL?


The easy stuff is over, not that anything was ever really easy in the semiconductor world. But getting the most from a chip in terms of lowering power and boosting performance will no longer be a function of the silicon alone.   Most software engineering has been done with existing languages and operating systems, but the well-known versions are aimed at general-purpose computing. They’r... » read more

Who’s Out, Who’s In


The EDA world is either doing better than most segments of the economy or coming apart at the seams, depending upon your perspective and your definition of exactly what an EDA company is. But at least one trend seems clear: As we push into the world of system-level design from chip design and SoCs instead of ASICs, the high-level trend is broader companies with more complete integrated packag... » read more

Artificial Intelligence: This Time It’s For Real


AI used to be the stuff of science fiction, but cheap processing power and storage has made it a reality. To find out what's being developed, System-Level Design (www.semiengineering.com) tracked down Rachel Goshorn, assistant professor of System Engineering at the Graduate School of Engineering and Applied Science in the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. Check out what she has to s... » read more

The ESL Conundrum


As Moore’s Law continues its relentless march, the “electronic system level” (ESL), which is the next higher level of abstraction above the register transfer level (RTL), continues to be adopted as an answer to the ever-increasing complexity of designing semiconductors. Although ESL emerged about five years ago, the term itself still can confound the very community that seeks to embrac... » read more

Case Study: A Better Way To Predict Weather


By Ed Sperling Most of our weather predictions are developed from about 150 stationary government radar systems, which interlock and occasionally overlap to create a cohesive picture. The picture isn’t perfect—in fact, it’s probably the equivalent of looking at a large, grainy satellite photo—which creates plenty of wrong forecasts. But the system can track large storms across state bo... » read more

Vectors of Change


Downturns have a way of changing things forever—sort of like the earthquake of 1812, which permanently re-routed the Mississippi River in three places. And while the common thinking is that things will go back to where they were before, they never do.   For one thing, the trend isn’t just smaller, faster, cheaper. It’s also shorter development cycles. Incredibly complex chips now tak... » read more

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