Electronic System Level (ESL) Design
1 Background of ESL development
Electronic System Level (ESL, Electronic System Level) design method and ESL tools are relatively new methodology and tools. Although the proposal of this methodology and the development of tools have begun in the 1990s, due to the inability of related tools and the lack of market demand, it has been in an obscure position in the EDA industry in the past few years. With the emergence of 90nm technology, the development of hundreds of millions of gates and the dramatic increase in the complexity of the system, ESL design has gradually received attention. But the ESL tools needed to actually execute the design process have only started to hit the market in the last few years.
In the traditional design process, SoC design focuses on hardware, embedded system design focuses on software, and system-on-board requires more attention to both software and hardware. With the development of SoC design, the scale of hardware design becomes more and more complex. At the same time, the increase in software complexity has greatly outpaced the increase in hardware complexity. Figure 4-15 summarizes data from a survey of SoC design engineers by the market research firm International Business Strategies.
The workload associated with designing embedded software and hardware structures increases dramatically with shrinking technology.
The increase in embedded software development efforts is largely due to the growing number of wireless and multimedia standards (or one of them) enabling compatibility and interoperability between consumer products.
Standards such as JPEG, MPEG, 3G, GSM/EDGE, IEEE 802.11/a/b/g WLAN, Bluetooth and UWB are all necessary for the commercial success of the modern electronics industry. The increase in workload for hardware implementation (RTL design, synthesis, physical design, etc.) is much less.
The increase in the workload of system architecture development is mainly due to the fact that SoC needs to integrate and optimize more and more complex processing, storage resources and communication protocols . Therefore, it becomes more important to explore the system structure at the level of function and system structure to help designers find the balance point of design.
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