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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