Platform's Promise
Design Tools of the Future - Today

My kids were prodigious overachievers all the way through high school, and I’ve always been very proud of them. However, there’s a different kind of feeling you get if one of your children follows in your own footsteps, accomplishing something you also were motivated to achieve. I studied electrical engineering in college because I wanted to design computers. I had been fascinated by the potential of programmable systems from an early age, and I worked hard to hone my skills and to build expertise in the challenging discipline. In the course of my schooling, I learned that most computers follow the same basic architecture, and that the process of computer system design is usually a series of decisions about which particular components – processors, peripherals, memory, bus structure - best fit the requirements of your project.

Last week, my daughter finished the design of her first computer system. She selected a processor with enough performance, but kept the cost and power consumption in check. She struggled for awhile over bus speeds and RAM configuration, finally choosing a setup with more memory than she thought she needed operating at a frighteningly fast clock rate. She fiddled with a few power options before selecting a scheme that seemed adequate, then began choosing peripherals that were specific to her intended applications. Her O/S decision had already been made except for a few details, and most of the applications software that would be running on the system had already been designed in advance. [more]

Algorithmic C Synthesis Fuels Functional Reuse
by Shawn McCloud, Mentor Graphics Corp.

Reusable intellectual property (IP) has been touted for years as the best strategy for efficiently creating ever more complicated system on chip (SoC) designs. IP is certainly gaining traction in today’s advanced ASIC and FPGA designs. However, adoption rates fall far short of what industry pundits predicted just a few years ago. Remember those breathless scenarios of small design teams stitching together hundreds of IP blocks to create incredibly complex ICs in just a matter of weeks? The reality today is much more prosaic.

According to the July 2004 report from Semico Research, Semiconductor Intellectual Property: An Idea Whose Time Has Come, the overall IP market in 2004 was a little less than $1.5 billion. True, the market is growing, but $900 million of the market is dominated by generic CPU or DSP cores. While the CPU market has experienced compound annual growth rates of 27%, the remaining non-CPU IP market, called commodity IP, has experienced growth rates closer to 17%. The primary reason for the widening growth gap is the inability of commodity IP to stay differentiated given ever changing system requirements and silicon processes. The result is loss of value at a much faster pace when compared to CPU cores. [more]