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Market
| 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 |
Productivity gaps |
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:
- 42.2% of embedded projects are late
- 18% of embedded projects are cancelled
- 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
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| The Limits of Traditional Practices and Tools |
| | Traditionally, electronic systems are developed following an organizational scheme that separates hardware from software developments. The system's architecture is defined at the start of the project based on decisions relying on the sole competence/experience of an expert.
. Such frozen architecture makes change management (adapting to new functionality/technology) very difficult.
. Poor architectural design leads to empirical hardware/software partitioning with no real performances/costs ratio analysis.
. A system dimensioned on the basis of intuition and estimations has good chances to end up either under-utilized (too expensive) or overloaded (inefficient).
. In addition, lack of interactions between hardware and software teams, having different cultures, tools, practices and no common reference model of the system, is the primary reason for integration problems and late detection of errors in the design (leading to higher fixing costs).
System-level design and hardware/software concurrent design (co-design) and simulation (co-simulation) are expected to solve some of the complexity, productivity, risk and cost-related issues cited before. |
| An emerging concept: system-level co-design |
The hardware/software co-design (standing for concurrent design) concept was first introduced in the early 90's. It consists of the joint development of software and hardware parts of the embedded system.
A new approach in system development called System-Level Design (SLD) has benefited from the co-design concept. Instead of thinking in terms of hardware and/or software components as building blocks for the system (bottom-up approach), developers think at a higher level of abstraction to identify and create solutions for the complete application (top-down approach).
Unfortunately, traditional technologies and tools for hardware and software developments cannot be used for system-level design and hardware/software co-design. A complete co-design technology has to combine characteristics of software programming languages (sequential execution of operations) and hardware description languages (parallel execution of operations), with timing and architecture definition capabilities. |
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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).
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| 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.
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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 |
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