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Product category: Design and Development Software
News Release from: Vast Systems Technology | Subject: Comet
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 14 July 2004

Hardware design in an SoC world

Adopting a virtual-prototype-based SoC development process offers all-round benefits, and makes the hardware designer's job easier, argues Graham Hellestrand, founder of Vast Systems Technology.

The world of the hardware design engineer has changed dramatically in recent years Designers no longer sit and code RTL in isolation to meet a paper specification and then wait for a hardware prototype before interacting with the software team to bring up the system

The combination of intense time-to-market pressures and the relentless growth in design size and complexity has rendered old development models inefficient and impractical.

A new approach is needed to ensure that hardware design takes place within the context of system-level requirements.

This article presents some background on the evolving role of hardware designers and outlines the requirements for effective performance in a world of systems-on-chips (SoCs).

It presents the technology of virtual prototypes, traditionally seen as tools for system architects and software engineers, and discusses the benefits that virtual prototypes confer on hardware designers as well.

It demonstrates that the result of adopting a virtual-prototype-based development process is a higher quality product, delivered to the market faster while consuming fewer project resources.

Today's SoC projects present daunting challenges to hardware designers.

Developing the RTL implementation for millions of gates is a huge effort; design verification is equally difficult.

The development process is long, often consuming an unacceptable level of resources in an attempt to tape out a correct design.

The sheer difficulty of this task often means that some design errors end up in silicon.

Several surveys have shown that more than half of all chips require at least one revision to fix bugs before product release.

The cost of a chip turn at submicron geometries can be well over a million dollars.

Unexpected silicon turns can kill a project, either because the company simply can't afford the extra cost or because the schedule delay means that the product would completely miss its market window.

These challenges lead to profound changes in the way that designers do their jobs.

The industry is moving toward a concurrent engineering process in which architects, hardware engineers and software developers interact closely up front and throughout the development cycle.

This allows designers to develop their implementation with far more confidence that system-level issues have been addressed.

In addition, the concurrent process allows the hardware design to be validated in the system-level environment along with the software, greatly reducing the chance of unpleasant surprises when the hardware prototypes and software are integrated.

The conventional electronic system development process begins with both business and functional requirements written in natural language.

These steps are usually performed by a combination of marketing and system architecture resources, leading to the development of a paper system specification document.

This specification typically defines the high-level architectural partition between hardware and software.

Once the specification is complete, the detailed hardware architecture is determined - typically manually.

At that point, the designers can begin coding RTL (or drawing schematics) to complete the design, which is then fabricated to produce hardware prototypes.

Traditionally, the software teams have had minimal involvement until the hardware prototypes are available.

Some of the software architecture definition and algorithm development might be done in parallel with the hardware team, but software engineers have not wanted to do much actual programming until a development prototype is available for creation and debug; only the hardware prototypes could fill this need.

The problems with a purely sequential system development flow are clear - the project timeline is long and valuable engineering resources are used inefficiently.

Rather than having an integrated project team, the programmers are usually working on other projects during the hardware development phase.

During software development, a few of the hardware designers are needed to maintain the prototypes and make engineering change orders (ECOs) to fix design problems found when the