With complexities of Systems-on-Chip rising almost daily, the design community has been searching for new vision that can handle given complexities with increased productivity and decreased times-to-market. The obvious solution, such as increasing levels of abstraction, introducing variety of IPs or offering new design languages will not solve the problem but only prolong the present status of inefficiency and confusion. What is needed is a drastic change in design automation for complex systems that consist of software and hardware. In order to design such systems efficiently, we need a new approach with a new design flow, with new models with well defined semantics and a new formalism that will support system synthesis and verification of software and hardware.
In order to find the solution, we will look first at the system gap between SW and HW designs and derive requirements for the design flow that includes software as well as hardware. In order to enable new EDA tools for model generation, simulation, synthesis and verification, the design flow has to be well defined with unique abstraction levels, model semantics and model transformations corresponding to design decisions made by the designers. We will introduce the concept of model algebra that supports this approach and can serve as an enabler for the extreme makeover of EDA. We will support this concept with hard data and finish with a prediction and a roadmap toward the final goal of increasing productivity by several orders of magnitude while reducing expertise level needed for design of complex systems to the basic principles of design science only. |
