What ESL Is Really About


There has been an almost constant disagreement between the generally held view about what ESL is and my own views on the subject. It is not completely surprising, given that I have spent most of my time as a verification specialist working within the EDA industry. EDA has been driven by design, and all of the largest EDA companies grew out of advances on the design side. [getkc id="10" kc_na... » read more

ESL: 20 Years Old, 10 To Go


It is a common perception that the rate of technology adoption accelerates. In 1873, the telephone was invented and, after 46 years, it had been adopted by one-quarter of the U.S. population. Television, invented in 1926 took 26 years. The PC in 1975 took just 16 years. It took only 7 years after the introduction of the Internet in 1991 before it was seeing significant levels of adoption. So... » read more

Mentor Buys Remainder Of Calypto


Back in 2002, a small startup company decided to tackle one of the most difficult problems in EDA—one that, if solved, could have opened up a whole new level of abstraction. Back when [getkc id="29" kc_name="logic synthesis"] was the new tool to try out, it suffered from the fact that gate-level [getkc id="11" kc_name="simulation"] had to be performed on the output, even if the input had been... » read more

Why Implementation Matters To System Design And Software


There has been quite some discussion in the recent past how well abstraction really works in enabling system design and verification. As I admitted in “Confessions of an ESL-Aholic” a while back, I have revised my view significantly over the years. While thinking originally of abstraction more as an panacea, it turns out that important decisions and analyses, such as for power and performan... » read more

What Happened To ESL


Electronic system level ([getkc id="48" kc_name="ESL"]) is a design methodology idea that gained steam in the last 20 years centered mainly around the idea of using higher levels of abstraction to define and implement an electronic design. It was defined and promoted by industry analyst Gary Smith, then at Gartner-Dataquest, and so much has been written on this topic over the years that ESL ... » read more

Poised For Aspect-Oriented Design?


In 1992, [getperson id=" 11046 " comment="Yoav Hollander"] had the idea to take a software programming discipline called aspect-oriented programming (AOP) and apply it to the verification of hardware. Those concepts were incorporated into the [gettech id="31021" t_name="e"] language and [getentity id="22068" e_name="Verisity"] was formed to commercialize it. Hollander had seen that using obj... » read more

Tale Of Two HLS Viewpoints


The Design Automation Conference attracts several co-located conferences, symposiums and other such gathering of people, often on more specialized topics than would appeal to the general DAC attendees. Some of them are more research-focused, but one conference is somewhat strange in that it is about a subject that has transitioned to commercial tool development and yet still remains an active a... » read more

Problems Ahead for EDA


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with [getperson id="11411" comment="Bill Neifert"], chief technology officer at [getentity id="22521" comment="Carbon Design Systems"]; [getperson id="11032" comment="Simon Davidmann”], chief executive officer for [getentity id="22036" e_name="Imperas”]; Randy Smith, vice president of marketing for [getentity id="22605" e_name="Sonics"] and Michel Courtoy,... » read more

Bigger Systems, Bigger Profits


Markets work in very mysterious ways. Technology that should be a slam dunk—think 2.5D with its promise of re-usable analog IP and faster performance, for example—are still hobbling along because no one wants to deal with the risk of a new architectural and manufacturing approach. They haven't even shown up yet in servers, where price is almost irrelevant. At the same time (no pun intended)... » read more

Tools And Flows In 2015


This year more than 26 people provided predictions for 2015. Most of these came from the EDA industry, so the results may be rather biased. However, ecosystems are coming closer together in many parts of the semiconductor food chain, meaning that the EDA companies often can see what is happening in dependent industries and in the system design houses. Thus their predictions may have already res... » read more

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