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

Interface Additions To The e Language For Effective Communication With SystemC TLM 2.0 Models


The last several years have seen strong adoption of transaction-level models using SystemC TLM 2.0. Those models are used for software validation and virtual prototyping. For functional verification, TLMs have a number of advantages—they are available earlier, they allow usersto divide their focus on verifying functionality and protocol/timing details, they enable higher level reuse, and they... » read more

The Trouble With Models


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Models and modeling concepts seem to be on the tip of every tongue these days. Once the promise of sparking true ESL design, the use of system-level models has settled into something more like enabling software development. There is also talk of leveraging models across the supply chain, but is this really possible yet? The concept of doing this incremental refinem... » read more

Model-Driven Design: Making Progress


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Model-driven design is coming into its own, in part because the old way of using models at advanced nodes doesn’t always produce usable chips and in part because of the need for making tradeoffs at the earliest stages of the design process. The concept of developing models for IC design is hardly a new one, and it is being done today on a number of levels rangin... » read more

Are We There Yet?


We’ve been talking in the industry for as long as I can remember about hardware and software co-design and I’m always curious to hear how that it progressing….or not. I posed this question to Jon McDonald, technical marketing engineer in Mentor Graphics’ design creation synthesis group who is constantly in touch with engineering teams. His take is that hardware and software teams are... » read more

Rethinking Models


By Ed Sperling The move to future process nodes will require more than just new materials, better layouts and higher levels of abstraction. It also will require a fundamental re-thinking of how high-level architectural models are created and what’s included in them. While the Transaction-Level Modeling (TLM) 2.0 standard has provided significant improvements for everything from layout to ... » read more

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