Plans Vs. Planning


The end of the year is a good time to look back at what’s happened over the past year, and look ahead to what might happen in the coming one. Two quotes that help my thought process when thinking about the might be coming, “Change is the law of life.” from Kennedy, and “Plans are nothing, but planning is indispensable” from Eisenhower. From my perspective, 2013 has been a good year... » read more

Vista Virtual Prototyping


Vista Virtual Prototyping provides an early, abstract functional model of the hardware to software engineers even before the hardware design is implemented in RTL. It can run software on embedded processor models at speeds par with board support packages, providing sufficiently fast simulation models for OS and application software validation. The Vista Virtual Prototyping solution has two dist... » read more

The Rest Is History


I recently fielded some questions on the evolution of Electronic System Level design. The questions started me thinking about how ESL is being applied today and what effect some of the historical assumptions might be having on ESL’s perceived use cases. It’s interesting that we are at a point to consider historical assumptions about ESL. Looking it up, Wikipedia claims that the term ESL ... » read more

Simple Economics


By Jon McDonald I was watching one of the MIT OpenCourseWare videos the other day. It was one of the lectures on Computer Science. I believe it was Prof. Robert Gallager who made a statement that really got me thinking: “Increasingly, system computational complexity has little impact on cost because of chip technology.” From a hardware perspective I initially had a bit of trouble with t... » read more

The Best Abstraction


By Jon McDonald The other day I was asked what would be the best level of abstraction to model at for system-level design. This is a question I get, in one form or another, far too often. It reminds me of an old quote attributed to Lincoln, slightly updated and applied to this subject: “One model can answer some of the questions all of the time, and all of the questions some of the time, but... » read more

Modeling Errors


Raising the abstraction level in increasingly large and complex design requires proxies. In IC world, we think of them in terms of higher abstractions, but the basic premise is that you can’t focus on ever detail without losing sight of the bigger picture, so we build models that can represent those details. Done well, these models are incredibly useful. They save time, make it easier to ... » read more

ESL Challenges


System-Level Design talks about the challenges of ESL with Cadence's Ran Avinun, Synopsys' Johannes Stahl, Mentor Graphics' Thomas Bollaert and Forte Design Systems' Brett Cline.   [youtube vid=HftMM71Epqo] » read more

TLM-Driven Design And Verification—Time For A Methodology Shift


While today’s RTL design and verification flows are a step up from the gate-level flows of two decades ago, RTL flows are straining to meet the demands of most product teams. When designs are sourced and verified at the register transfer level (RTL), IP reuse is difficult, functional verification is lengthy and cumbersome, and architectural decisions cannot be confirmed prior to RTL verificat... » read more

Show Me


By Jon McDonald Many people—engineers especially, myself included—are naturally biased against change. To get an organization to change takes significant energy. This isn’t a new trend. Much of the sentiment of the camp against change can be summed up by referring back to an 1899 quote from Missouri Sen. Willard Vandiver: “… frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am f... » read more

Choosing The Right Kite


By Jon McDonald At my 16-year-old son’s suggestion the two of us have been taking kite-surfing lessons. Last weekend part of the lesson covered the different kinds of kites, how they compare and reasons to use one versus another. One of the points made by the instructor was the need to have different kites for different conditions. It’s such a simple concept, but one that was forgotten ... » read more

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