System Realization Webinars in 2010 -- A Summary

Last year was unprecedented for Cadence. We came up with the EDA360 vision, reorganized internally to align to that vision, and established some great partnerships to help our customers realize their own visions around EDA360. The ED360 vision paper has been well received by both customers and competition, giving further validation to the concept.

One of the premises of the paper is that software applications (or "apps") are taking precedence over the hardware. Applications such as social networking (Facebook), streaming audio (Pandora), and streaming video (Youtube, Netfix, Hulu ) are driving customers to spend, and underlying hardware is becoming less relevant  (phone, tablet, laptop, desktop).

The ideal scenario would be if one could predict the kind of applications that will become big, and start designing hardware early, but that is almost impossible given the amount of innovation happening in the software industry. It would be better if hardware design companies create hardware at higher levels of abstraction and use automation to implement the logic as industry trends become more visible.

Cadence understands that this is not a problem that can be solved by just one EDA company or one design house. The solution requires EDA companies to work with each other and with customers to create an ecosystem that will help everyone reduce the design cycle. To foster partnerships, Cadence established the System Realization Alliance program which offers free licenses and joint marketing opportunities to smaller companies working in the system realization space on electronic system level (ESL) related technologies.

Last quarter, Cadence offered a platform for all its System Realization partners to speak to Cadence customers about their offerings. Nine of our early partners presented webinars to Cadence's customers. The webinars provided a quick look into tools and services being provided by these partners.

The series started with XtremeEDA. XtremeEDA is a services organization, based in U.S., that is specializing in verification and ESL services. They discussed the issues plaguing the ESL market and reasons for slow adoption of the methodology. The webinar went through new methodologies that could ease the pain of adopting ESL-based approaches.

The next webinar was presented by CircuitSutra, which is a specialist services company, focusing on SystemC modeling and virtual prototype development. The webinar showed the power and flexibility of Virtual Prototypes. Did you know that a virtual prototype can be hooked up to real world environment by tapping into Ethernet, USB and UART of the host machine? This opens up a realm of possibilities on the kind of early software verification you can do.

The third webinar in the series was presented by Imperas. Imperas is a well known name for all those using or creating virtual prototypes, because of its impressive line up of fast microcontroller models. Imperas demonstrated the impressive performance of their models. The throughput of their models is often higher than real silicon devices. This is a boon for organizations that want to arm their application development teams with models of hardware well before hardware is realized.

The fourth was presented by Calypto -- the only company to have a solution for formal comparison of C/C++/SystemC models with their RTL implementations. Almost all companies using virtual prototypes use Calypto's SLEC to keep their silicon implementations synchronized with the virtual prototype throughout the design cycle. Calypto showed off the capabilities of their SLEC solution. Interestingly, they also showed their power analysis tool that goes over the RTL and modifies it automatically to reduce the power consumption without sacrificing functionality or performance.

TSMC reference flow 11 has two aspects covering the ESL domain. The first is TLM design and verification (TLM D&V) and the second is High Level Synthesis. We had two webinars presented by TSMC, each covering one aspect. The TLM design and verification part covers the different levels of abstraction at which TLM models can be created, how the models at different levels can interact, and how UVM fits in this scenario. The High Level Synthesis part covers the ESL methodology that TSMC has established in their flow to help customers increase productivity by making adoption of HLS easier. The methodology focuses on creating high-level models in C/C++/SystemC and using an interactive approach to understand resource and timing requirements of the design.

Cadence Services team has rich experience on helping our customers adopt ESL solutions. The sixth webinar in the series covered some case studies of the type of work our services team has done with customers. Feel free to go through the webinar to see the details.

One of the major roadblocks in adopting virtual prototypes is the availability of TLM models. CoFluent design presented the 8^th webinar in the series and they showed their software CoFluent Studio. This software lets you capture system specification, either graphically or in Sys-ML, and generates SystemC TLM code for virtual prototyping.

I have often been asked if functional coverage on SystemC blocks is possible. The ninth webinar in the series was presented by JEDA Technologies and they showed their SystemC coverage tool. The nice thing about their coverage tool is that it performs functional coverage on SystemC blocks and is hardware aware. Since SystemC code is much smaller (in number of lines of code) than RTL, you can get relatively high coverage with fewer lines of testbench code. But same set of tests on RTL would produce much less coverage. JEDA's coverage tool maps the coverage in SystemC with its possible coverage in RTL and gives you correct functional coverage upfront.

The final webinar in the series was presented by Magillem. Magillem provides IP-XACT related software. They have tools to create, use and check IP-XACT specification for SystemC TLM, RTL or netlist level blocks. IP-XACT is an IEEE standard that tries to address the issues encountered when integrating IPs from many sources. With standardized IP-XACT wrappers, automatic tools can be used to connect IP blocks and generate SoC netlists.  Their webinar showed a demo of their tools and demonstrated the advantages of an IP-XACT driven flow over a traditional hand assembly flow.

All the webinars have been recorded and archived. Please visit the link and see the webinars you find interesting. We will resume the webinar series later in the quarter, and if you want to be made aware of invites for next series, please email me.

Mayank Bhatia