Is The Industry Ready For Mainstream Adoption of Higher Abstraction?

I was recently part of an industry wide interview conducted by Clive "Max" Maxfield of TechBites. Max is trying to uncover the reality behind the apparent trend to move to the high level abstraction of transactions for design and verification. I gave the Cadence point of view that this is indeed a real trend, that major customers are moving fast to adopt a TLM design and verification solution to achieve higher productivity, quality, and more reusability of the design IP.

While the EDA vendor comments show their various positions relative to their offerings, the most interesting indicators of the trend comes from the customers: ARM, Ericsson, ITRI, NXP, Sonics, ST, ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments. It is clear there is a trend, that customers are moving to a higher level of abstraction. Each is approaching the transition differently, but they universally view it as an imperative for continued development success.

Max is releasing the questions one at a time, though most of them are posted (8 of 12 at this writing). You can find the article starting from the introduction at:

http://www.techbites.com/200912211530/myblog/blog/z000c-systemc-and-transaction-level-modeling-tlm.html

We see the future, and the future is now!

Steve Brown