In June 2008, I published an article for ChipDesign Magazine, on an area of chip design which, from our customer experience, seemed to be burgeoning out of control. The article - ‘Is that an elephant in your flow?’, was a play on the elephant in the room idiom – something that is relatively obvious but essentially ignored. Here is a quote from this article:
“While the industry has been looking at new ways to specify and model chips, it has been largely distracted from the very real and emerging problems that remain in actually assembling them. Even at the stage that we know the architecture of the chip we want to build, and even if we have all or most of the IP on the shelf, it’s getting more and more difficult to put it all together. This is the “Elephant in the Room” of SoC design. Global SoC design pressures are translating into a number of forces that are besieging the integration task on all sides .. now is the time to acknowledge the SoC integration crisis. There’s an elephant in the flow."
Duolog started life as an IP provider. In order to fund our wireless IP R&D, we also provided IP and chip design/verification services. Within these services we noticed an emerging problem at the front-end of the chip design process. Our customers had growing IP libraries that were being reused more and more frequently, but the infrastructures required to integrate and implement them were becoming too complex and cumbersome. Software development schedules mandated earlier and more robust hardware deliverables as well as rapid turnaround time. The traditional in-house solutions (often based on Excel and/or scripts) were simply grinding to a halt.
We saw an opportunity to tackle the integration problem and, from 2002 we started working on integration solutions to remove these multi-layer bottlenecks. By 2006 we had developed three primary solutions to achieve full chip integration from IP port to chip pin, including IP connectivity, HW/SW integration and I/O layer generation. By late 2007, we realized that we were gaining more value and more revenue from EDA offerings than from our IP. We therefore decided to refocus Duolog fully on the EDA path. Duolog exhibited for the first time at DAC’08 where we won 3 best-of-DAC awards. Our theme at the show – The elephant in the room!
So when Cadence recently announced their EDA360 vision, predicting an integration-centric future for EDA, we took it as a welcome justification of our change in direction and of our latest product - the Socrates Chip Integration Platform.
There are still many challenges to be addressed in this area, but at least someone else has spotted the elephant in the flow and maybe now, as a community, we can manage it.
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