System Design 2012 – Real Users Achieving Real Results!

This morning the final success story my team has been working on for this year went live. Texas Instruments reports on how they achieved greater than 90% accurate correlation between an architectural power estimation and actual silicon! This deserves its own blog early next year, but meanwhile, it has triggered reflections on how the year 2012 went.

This year is special, actually, for me personally. It was this holiday season 15 years ago that I said goodbye to my parents and brother in Germany and moved to the U.S. to join Cadence, at the time as Technical Marketing Manager for the Felix Initiative, later resulting in the product VCC, short for "Virtual Component Co-Design." I remember the tearful goodbye 15 years ago and now all my bags are packed to go home to Germany to see my folks for the holidays. For sure I will have to report back whether the last 15 years were worth it.

In Germany the saying is that a man has to do three things in life to have lived: Plant a tree, write a book and father a child. I have planted many trees over the years in my garden. Check. I have at this point contributed at least 5 book chapters to various books -- two of them this year. Together with my articles and blog posts I am happy to argue the second point. Check. For the third point I have a wonderful almost 7 year old daughter joining me for the trip to Germany. Her Mom and I have now almost 8 years of successful parenting experience, but as all parents know, this is an ongoing project.

On the professional side my mission in the last 15 years has been like I remember Aart De Geus positioning it in a keynote at DATE in 2001 or 2002: "Now that the genome is deciphered, the design productivity gap is the next big problem to figure out. Let's get to it." And we have made huge progress! If anything, the year 2012 has been proof to me in many ways that real users are achieving real results using system-level design, and specifically with our System Development Suite.

Here are some of the highlights in my book:

• We had entered the year with information on Panasonic's use of Palladium XP to verify hardware/software integration.
• At DVCon we presented at NASCUG with Xilinx on the Zynq platform , its TLM enablement and effect on projects. We also were on a panel discussing Build or Buy with Xilinx and ARM on using hardware assisted verification.
• Several customers presented on the System Development Suite tools during CDNLive! in March, including AMD on Palladium use for In-Circuit Acceleration, Texas Instruments on their Palladium Enterprise use, Freescale on using Palladium for test pattern generation, Xilinx on VSP virtual platform use for Zynq, Duolog in Virtual Platform Development, PMC Sierra on SpecMan and Palladium as well as ARM on virtual platform enablement.
• Later in March Design West came along as well and we outlined how we partner with ARM.
• At CDNLive! in Munich in May we announced In-circuit Acceleration and the System Development Suite 2012 and expanded support for Accelerated VIP with endorsements from NVidia, Freescale, Xilinx and AMD. At CDNLive! in Munich itself we had Texas Instruments (Co-Verification), Duolog (Virtual Platforms), ARM (VSP), Ericsson (Virtual Platforms) and Method2Business (Virtual Platforms) present on their system development projects.
• We had 11 customers and partners talk about system development with the System Development Suite tools at DAC in San Francisco, at which also Gary Smith reported on ESL growth, including Method2Business (VSP), Rohde & Schwarz (Palladium), Xilinx (both on VSP and Palladium XP), ARM (VSP), LSI (RPP and Palladium), AMD (Palladium), NextOP (Palladium), Imperas (VSP), Le Croy (Palladium) and Dini (RPP).
• Later in the year, at CDNLive! China, Nufront talked about their use of Palladium for tablet design, and NHIDC reported on their use of Palladium as well.
• At CDNLive! India in October, ST Microelectronics reported on coverage on Palladium, Freescale described their FPGA Based Prototyping usage, Samsung described how Accelerated Verification IP is used to connect Palladium with Firmware development -- we later published more details on this particular use model and ARM described their use of Palladium.
• CDNLive! Israel brought me for the first time to Israel myself, and I saw Freescale report on High-Level synthesis, SIGMA and CSR report on their Palladium experiences, as well as Samsung and Altair presenting as part of my overview on how they use RTL Simulation, Emulation and FPGA Based Prototyping in conjunction.
• To round up the year we published success stories with Samsung on Accelerated Verification IP, Nufront using Palladium and getting 1000x speedup and now Texas Instruments (Low Power on Palladium).

What a year 2012 it was! I will truly be able to tell them that the last 15 years were well worth it! I witnessed system development to find adoption and this year especially a large number of real users were achieving real results.

Where will we go from here? I have been writing about my thoughts on that recently here in my Blog Frankly Speaking in my last post this year called "Looking back at 2012", as well as in my column Systems to Silicon in "Hybrid Execution And Software-Driven Verification Will Emerge In 2013".

Happy Holidays and let's have a great 2013!

Frank Schirrmeister