John Cooley’s DeepChip email this morning reports that EDAC, the consortium of EDA vendors, has decided to underwrite the long-time tradition of Free Monday at DAC which is coming up on July 27-less than three weeks from now. DAC’s at San Francisco’s Moscone Center this year, so it’s accessible to all of Silicon Valley with a short car, bus, or train ride.
If you want to take advantage of “Free Monday” DAC registration, go to http://www.deepchip.com/FreeMonday.html. Complete all four registration pages. On the third page of the online registration form, you’ll find a newly added “Free Monday Exhibits” option. You must check this box to get free registration for Monday. The fourth page of the form will show a web receipt with their unique bar-code confirmation on it. You must print this entire page and bring it to DAC on Monday, July 27, where you’ll present the bar-code page to the Advance Registration desk located in Moscone Center’s North Lobby.
Coincidentally, I’m on a Pavilion Panel at 1 pm on what’s now Free Monday at DAC. I’m joining EDA luminary Jim Hogan, Stanford’s Per Enge, and Sonics’ Grant Pierce. We’re discussing the long road to system-level signoff. Hope to see you there because there’s no better way to wring power out of a system design than at the architectural level. Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt from a system-level design manifesto written by Hogan and Peter Levin:
“…we’re stubbornly bullish on the idea that abstraction is always, with no exception, the key to utility and productivity. Because of the tremendous advances in – and therefore commoditization of – semiconductor manufacturing the value of complex devices, especially SoCs, is utterly dependent upon the ability to specify well, implement quickly, test for fidelity, and validate for function. Of course, like the engine under the hood of a car, hardware matters; it can add to or detract from the user experience. On the other hand, how many of us know or care about the brand of the motor. Most drivers take such things for granted, as long as their propulsion needs – expressed in (high level) terms of fuel economy, power and performance – are well satisfied. It is no accident that SoC design feels very similar to systems design, especially as software content becomes the primary factor of differentiation and scalability.
But don’t expect the polygon pushers to reach high into the system any more than you would expect an assembly programmer to build the advanced apps in a smart phone. Too expensive, too slow, too restrictive. When the wise men come, they will know two things: how to integrate the components of design implementation in a way that obfuscates the details, and how to use abstraction to their benefit. And they won’t call it ESL; however they may call it virtualization, just as they do today in the IT industry.
In fact, our customers are already years ahead of the tools they buy. Sure, they care about compactness, manufacturability, and power. But the real battleground – at least between them – is the truly differentiated trade-space between device integrity (does it do what I want it to do?), reliability (will it perform well, long, and under duress?), and security (am I assured of my privacy, and protection against nefarious intrusion?).
The promise of ‘system level’ anything – we’re going to propose a more ambitious new name in a second – is to break down the parochial boundaries that separate abstraction layers like so much cruddy varnish, and instead integrate them under in a common methodology and view. This hypothetical tool – none exists yet but we’re unshakably optimistic – would truly facilitate architectural exploration without the constraining ties to hardware targets, bastardized (or proprietary) language, and prohibitive cost of migrating from simulation to emulation, and emulation to target platform. Moreover, and crucially, it has to conveniently and sensibly accommodate the application software that differentiates our customers’ products in the market. With possibly one large exception, this is basically how they make their profits. In other words, it is a pre-requisite, and a recipe, for the holy grail of scale.”
