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Embedded | System-on-Chip | FPGA
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 will differentiate new products, devices achieve more and more functions and get more and more complex. Shorter market windows and accelerated obsolescence cycles impose reduced development times.
Like all electronic systems, systems-on-chip (SoC) are subject to the contradictory driving forces described above: increase in complexity and decrease in time and costs. In addition, specific SoC characteristics exacerbate difficulties in their design: large silicon capacity, tight integration of heterogeneous components, complex inter-components connections, close hardware/software interdependencies and multidisciplinary scope.
Architectural design crystallizes the above challenges and quickly becomes a critical step in SoC design, especially for assessing performances. |
SoC designs are driven by the following 3 major trends:
| - In order to mitigate technical and economical risks and to reduce costs, electronic manufacturers tend to: derive as many products as possible from a common platform, maximize reuse of software and hardware pieces (IP blocks) and introduce flexibility in reconfigurable hardware.
- Most features and differentiation in an electronic product goes in software and reconfigurable hardware. As software developments can take up to 70% of the complete design, it is essential to provide a development platform upon which software engineers can develop and test their code well in advance of the actual silicon being available.
- Developers can no longer handle complexity and silicon capacity of today’s designs with traditional tools and practices. They need to move up to the next level of abstraction.
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| The combination of the beside trends results in the following SoC market dynamics:
| - Designers standardize on the SystemC language for: developing at a higher-level of abstraction (typically transaction level), developing and integrating IP components, co-simulating hardware and software.
- The development of the real hardware platform is done in parallel with the creation of a SystemC-based virtual SoC platform dedicated to application development and performances study.
- SoC-based application design necessarily follows a top-down process from needs down to verification on a virtual SoC platform in a first time and next, implementation on the real hardware. Thus, top-down application design and bottom-up platform design processes necessarily have to meet at some point.
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| SoC Architecting & Design Environment |
| | Today, designers go beyond block-by-block IP reuse and move to platform-based design by aggregating groups of components into a reusable platform architecture. The key problem resides in choosing the right architecture capable of successfully delivering the system’s functionality while respecting other constraints such as performances, real-time, costs, power consumption, etc.
Neither Transaction Level Modeling (TLM) nor SystemC alone allow for architectural exploration and prospective (i.e. starting from system specifications before the platform is defined and developed) performances analysis.
Platform-based design is necessary but not sufficient: choosing the right platform for your application is essential. |
SoC Design Environment |
CoFluent Studio is a ESL (Electronic System-Level) modeling & simulation environment that provides designers with the means to graphically design and architect a high-level model of their SoC in mixed hardware/software intuitive system-level graphical notations.
The model is automatically translated into SystemC 2.0 and co-simulated with CoFluent Studio for behavioral verification and prospective performances analysis thanks to effective monitoring tools displaying customizable simulation traces.
The separation between physics-free application model and platform model allows fast interactive exploration of the architectural design space. |
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