Technological Mutations and Market Pressure
The Limits of Traditional Practices and Tools
Get Fluent in Co-Design with CoFluent Studio
Technological Mutations and Market Pressure
Electronic devices are pervasive in our every day lives for communications, entertainment, automation, transport, security and other purposes. The electronics industry is an incredibly fast changing and competitive environment, driven by perpetual demand for novelty and technological progress.
As electronic manufacturers need to develop rich features that should differentiate new products, devices achieve more and more functions and get more and more complex.
Their technologies are characterized by ever increasing integration, miniaturization, performance and other physical constraints. The software portion constantly grows as it implements the majority of functions while hardware components increase their capacity, integration level and performance to keep up with software needs and provide integrated programmable platforms.
Shorter market windows and accelerated obsolescence cycles impose reduced development times.
The addition of profitability imperatives create a tough economical context in which companies need to address new markets with maximized differentiation and have to keep on delivering innovative and cheaper products in shorter times.
Contradictory driving forces
Difficulties that electronic system developers face are well known. They are the result of the two contradictory driving forces described above: increase in complexity and decrease in development time and costs (development costs and COGS).
Statistics (2002 sources: VDC, Gartner Dataquest, Collett International Research) clearly illustrate the tremendous pressure under which electronic projects are:
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42.2% of embedded projects are late
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18% of embedded projects are cancelled
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39% chip designs achieve first silicon success
Reasons to the above difficulties mainly reside in complexity, productivity and market-related issues.
System developers can no longer sustain the growth in complexity and deliver expected productivity gains with today’s tools and practices as shown on the figure aside (source: Philips Semiconductors).
Electronic manufacturers' needs
Solutions to the above problems are well known, but not so easy to put into practice:
- Decreasing development costs and times requires improving productivity and better mastering complexity
- Mitigating delay/cancellation risks requires validating design solutions and easing change management
- Reducing the cost of the final product requires optimizing the design solution
- Maximizing differentiation/added value requires spending resources on innovation and not reinventing the wheel
The Limits of Traditional Practices and Tools
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Get Fluent in Co-Design with CoFluent Studio
CoFluent Design aims at offering system-level co-design solutions for addressing the development of next-generation more complex electronic systems.
The behavioral and architectural design technology innovation it brings should contribute to delivering the next major productivity improvement sought by the industry (as illustrated for semiconductors in the ITRS 2003 edition on design for example).
ESL: the EDA and embedded systems confluence
Embedded software design tools and EDA tools are complementary tools in many respects, because both sets of tools are required to design, verify and test any electronic system that has software content. Vendors in these markets have tended to stay within their respective domains. It is becoming evident that a need exists for a unified flow at the highest level of design abstraction, namely, the system level. This has led to the development of a new class of tools, which are collectively called electronic system-level (ESL) tools.
Existing ESL design tools are basically of two sorts:
- Mainly focusing on functional/behavioral design, the first come from the specifications/modeling domain to reach only the embedded software application development field (top-down process). None support time properties of models and performance analysis requires using real hardware targets when implementation is almost complete.
- Mainly focusing on hardware platform design, the second come from the EDA space and are moving up the abstraction layers, from RTL to transaction level (bottom-up process). Development of the application is usually still left as a separate activity.
CoFluent Studio is the only tool that offers true capabilities for hardware/software real-time co-modeling and application-level design space exploration based on prospective performance analysis allowing for architecture decisions very early on the project.
CoFluent Studio is an SDE (System Design Environment) that addresses the functional/behavioral and application-driven architectural design stages, and reaches both the software and hardware domains.
System Design Environment
CoFluent Studio can be used for various purposes:
- Timed-behavioral modeling of systems: including functional modeling and verification, targeted at system and modeling engineers
- System architecting: including timed-behavioral modeling, architectural modeling and performances analysis, targeted at system architects