Experts At The Table: ESL Reality Check


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design sat down to discuss electronic-system-level design with Stephen Bailey, director of emerging technologies for the design verification technology group at Mentor Graphics; Michael McNamara, vice president and general manager of Cadence’s System-Level Division; Ghislain Kaiser, CEO of DOCEA Power, and Shawn McCloud, vice president of marketing at Calypto. Wha... » read more

The Growing Need For A Systems Approach


By Gabe Moretti Electronic computing systems have gone through an evolutionary cycle since the invention of the mainframe, and the process is continuing. Semiconductor technology, mostly based on CMOS fabrication methods, has enabled an increase in design complexity and device functionality that have revolutionized the world. But 20nm processes may be the last that obey Newtonian physics. T... » read more

Start The Revolution


By Jon McDonald “Know thyself.” That advice is promoted in so many different forms it's hard to know where it started. I have been involved in a number of projects recently in which these words would have greatly simplified the project flow. “Simplified” is probably not quite the right word. The issue in this case is not to simplify the project, but to properly understand, characterize... » read more

Virtual Prototyping Takes Off


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Skyrocketing software development costs, which for years have been “somebody else’s problem,” are now firmly part of the SoC development teams list of headaches. That has made virtual prototyping far more popular, particularly at 40nm and beyond, where engineers are looking at this approach as a way of managing complexity, doing architectural exploration and eve... » read more

Management Buys Into ESL


By Jon McDonald Over the past few weeks I've spent a significant amount of time at industry shows, the largest of which is DAC. It was interesting to hear the tone of the conversations this year around ESL. ESL has reached a level of acceptance such that it is now being co-opted and interpreted to cover an amazing array of activities. I have felt for a while that the electronic design indus... » read more

Keeping Up With Complexity


By Ed Sperling There are two schools of thought in designing complex SoCs. One says that increasing complexity requires a higher level of abstraction. The other says providing enough detail to get the design right is the only effective way to do it. There are staunch proponents of both approaches, but what has been missing are bridges to tie the higher level of abstraction to the more labo... » read more

How Is ESL Like an Elephant?


By Jon McDonald Recently I have been involved in a number of activities with customers, bringing together their hardware, software, algorithm, and systems engineers to understand how to improve their processes using ESL capabilities. This included inviting experts from the various EDA technology areas to explore the best approaches for applying the full range of ESL capabilities to specific cu... » read more

Slow Adoption for ESL


By Brian Fuller It’s been more than a decade since electronic system level (ESL) abstraction started to gain traction in EDA. It’s been more than a few years since the industry began to plan for the day when the benefits of embracing C-language approaches to design description and validation would find designers churning out massively complex and profitable designs while sitting in lawn ch... » read more

Insurance, Doctors And ESL


By Jon McDonald Return on investment is a subject that comes up frequently when people are thinking about adopting higher-level design approaches. After all, we are talking about adding work—we need to model, design, simulate and analyze the system. All of these tasks take time and cost money. So what are we getting in return? Before we can think about the return, we have to identify wha... » read more

The Bigger Picture


The pace of change in system-level design is no longer confined just to technology. It now hinges largely on whether enough engineers can make the leap from RTL or synthesis or verification or any other specialty to systems engineer. This is no small feat. It requires re-tooling and learning of modeling and other concepts that until now have been largely at the architectural level. It may ... » read more

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