The authors address some of the challenges and solutions in mixing levels of design abstraction in an ESL virtual prototype
Christopher Lennard is the ESL strategic marketing manager for ARM responsible for the company’s ESL design-flow integration strategy. He is the vice-chair of the SPIRIT Consortium, an international standards body addressing design-flow integration.
Matthew Bellantoni is a product marketing manager at Carbon Design Systems. He has 13 years of experience in the EDA industry and has previously held software development and management positions at Viewlogic Systems and Chrysalis Symbolic Design.
The advent of extreme fine line processes at 130nm or less presents many challenges. On the back end, optimizing a design to manage physical effects such as power, heat, and timing is more daunting than ever. At the front end, implementing a system-on-chip’s (SoC) behavior and features is becoming equally difficult. The early exploration of system architectures is now a critical part of the SoC design process that ensures hardware and software engineers have a well-specified and validated context for their work. Furthermore, the increasing adoption of intellectual property (IP) from multiple sources — legacy, third-party, and newly created — means that systems integration is becoming as significant as the implementation of new design components.
are required.