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Atmel SMART

Atmel SMART
by Paul McLellan on 06-09-2014 at 6:00 pm
Categories: Foundries

I talked last week about the internet of things (IoT) panel I attended at DAC. One thing that is clear is that IoT is not really a market on its own, but nonetheless the fact that billions of edge-node devices are going to be connected to the internet is a real trend. One company that takes IoT very seriously is Atmel, since they have an enormous range of microcontrollers (currently over 500 different models) both based on their proprietary AVR architecture and a range of ARM-based controllers. A lot of the IoT market is not going to be big integrated SoCs but rather small boards put together with a microcontroller, communications, some sensors and a lot of software.

Today Atmel launched SMART which is a new brand of ARM-based microcontrollers along with SmartConnect SAM W23 modules enabling WiFi connectivity combining the best of high performance and low power technology for IoT applications. Plus, of course, the software stacks required to make it all work.

These are flash-based microcontrollers based on the ARM Cortex M0+, M3 and M4 with memory ranging from 8KB to 2MB of flash including a rich peripheral and feature mix. There are also ARM Cortex A5 devices without on-chip flash memory.


As part of the Atmel | SMART product offering, the SAM W23 module offers the ideal solution for designers seeking to integrate Wi-Fi connectivity even with limited experience with IEEE802.11, RTOS, IP Stack or RF. These modules are based on Atmel’s industry leading ultra-low-power Wi-Fi SoC combined with Atmel’s ARM Cortex M0+ based microcontroller technology. This turnkey system provides an integrated software solution with application and security protocols such as TLS, integrated network services (TCP/IP stack) and a standard Real Time Operating System (RTOS) which are all available through a simple serial host interface (SPI, UART) within Atmel Studio 6’s integrated development platform (IDP). This makes it easy for designers to add internet connectivity to any system, so enabling it to participate in the nascent IoT market.


Atmel ARM-based MPUs range from entry-level devices to advance highly integrated devices with extensive connectivity, refined interfaces and ironclad security. Atmel provides a full range of hardware and software tools for ARM-based MPUs to make the design process easier and reduce time to market. Atmel also works with a worldwide network of partners to deliver additional hardware and software solutions for these devices.

To find Atmel microcontrollers you can use the microcontroller selector page here. This allows you to put in the choices you want and it will home in the the microcontrollers that meet your requirements.


More articles by Paul McLellan…

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Mobile: China Rising

Mobile: China Rising
by Paul McLellan on 06-09-2014 at 3:00 pm
Categories: Mobile

The mobile numbers for Q1 are now published. At #1 as always is Samsung, who shipped 86M phones for 30% market share. At #2, with almost half as much volume, is Apple who shipped 44M phones. Round here in silicon valley pretty much everyone has either a Samsung Galaxy or an iPhone so you don’t get any sense of who the other major players are, because the action is mostly in China. Just as a datapoint, China Mobile has over 750M subscribers. Yes, twice the size of the entire US population.

Number 3 is Huawei with 18M units giving them 6% market share. Of course Huawei also purchased (apparently) Broadcom’s baseband business as Broadcom joined TI, ST, Freescale and others and got out of mobile. Qualcomm, Mediatek and Marvell are the key remaining players (and struggling to get a foothold, Intel).

The top 10 is rounded out with Lenovo (China), LG (Korea), ZTE (China), Coolpad (China), Xiaomi (China), Sony (Japan) and Nokia/Microsoft (Finland).


The fall of Nokia is something that business schools will be studying for years I’m sure. It is not that long ago that Nokia had 30% market share and shipped over 1M phones every day. In first quarter they shipped just 7M smartphones. Of course they are now part of Microsoft, and with a new CEO who has his eye firmly on mobile, it will be interesting to see if they manage to claw their way back. This is a business where relationships with the operators are the key, since they decide which phones get sold and which do not. Obviously if a company like China Mobile decides to push a brand hard, it makes a huge difference.

For semiconductor, mobile is really important. Baseband chips and modems make up a lot of the volume especially at the most advanced process nodes. Qualcomm is shipping 20nm silicon out of TSMC and will be the first volume for 16nm when it is available (along with Xilinx but they don’t need that many wafers, especially early in the process life-cycle). Of course Samsung manufactures most of its own silicon (maybe all, I’m not sure). Apple designs its own application processors (those Ax chips) but uses Qualcomm for modems. That covers roughly 50% of the market which is why other companies struggle since the rest of the market is fragmented and Samsung and Apple make a huge percentage of the profits of the mobile industry. In the middle of last year it was over 100%, meaning the rest of the suppliers in aggregate lost money.


More articles by Paul McLellan…

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An Update on Calibre at DAC

An Update on Calibre at DAC
by Daniel Payne on 06-09-2014 at 12:00 pm
Categories: EDA

Even though I live just 7 miles away from the Mentor Graphics corporate office in Oregon, I visited their DAC suite in San Francisco last week to get an update on Calibrefrom Michael White. The Calibre tools are used during IC verification and sign-off by performing DRC (Design Rule Checking) and LVS (Layout Versus Schematic).

Continue reading “An Update on Calibre at DAC”

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A Re-look at TI’s Businesses, Strategies & Future

A Re-look at TI’s Businesses, Strategies & Future
by Pawan Fangaria on 06-09-2014 at 8:00 am
Categories: EDA, Foundries, General

In recent days I’ve seen several long discussions about Texas Instrumentslosing its grip in semiconductor industry when it came out of a business it was strong in, i.e. wireless business. It seems the semiconductor community has not digested the fact that TI, very rightly, came out of the OMAP business at the right time. The smartphone business is maturing and is characterized by short life cycle, thinning profit margin and rising competition. True, in last decade it was a very lucrative business and TI skimmed good revenue out of it. In fact, TI had initiated Nokia in using TI’s DSP chip as the core of cellphone and becoming the champion of cellphone technology. However, as always, TI doesn’t like to fall into what we call ‘innovator’s dilemma’ as Nokia did. TI came out of the smartphone business when it sensed this market going into maturation stage with little profitable incentives. I wouldn’t argue on the fact that the same business may fit very well into some other competitors’ scheme of things. Also I will not be surprised if TI finds another start-up or any little known company which can take any of TI’s ideas in analog and embedded space, a different use of DSP (and MEMS) in the scheme of IoT and make it the next big thing. TI is good at finding such companies which can drive TI’s business and make it a win-win for both.

The good thing I like about TI is that it’s not stuck with one business; it regularly reviews its businesses and strategies around those and churns them to its benefit. That’s the reason we see major changes in TI’s offerings in every 5 to 10 years. Here is how we can sum up the evolution of TI’s businesses since its invention of silicon transistor and IC (I’m not going into oil & gas business prior to that) –

1960s – Portable radios, calculators, IC manufacturing
1970s – Microprocessors and Microprocessor controlled devices, Digital watches
Early 1980s – Home computers, Printers
Late 1980s – Custom microprocessors, DSP cores
1990s – Multimedia video processors, DSP, Analog chips
2000s – Wireless phone chips, OMAP, Embedded Processing, MEMS, DLP
2010s – Strengthening core businesses in Analog and Embedded, MEMS and DLP

During this long tenure, obviously there were many ups and downs, often the wrong strategies or ‘juice drying up’ was sensed sooner than later and right level of changes were done in time. In order to not fall out, it’s necessary to constantly look for and focus on financially viable businesses with good operating profit margins. Of course, SCBA (Social Cost Benefit Analysis) is another aspect, but that should be applicable up to a certain extent and not confused with the actual financial viability.

Talking about commodities, if we look at the list of offerings since 1960s, there are quite a lot looking like commodities, but each of them was innovative at its first instance and provided lucrative business at one point of time, exceptions apart. I find it absolutely fine to have multiple types of eggs in the same basket (in other words a conglomerate with diversified risks under the same umbrella), but each of those eggs with a positive NPV. Any negative NPV egg has to be taken out and put to a different use before it gets completely rotten, it may spoil other eggs.

An important point to observe here is about the core competencies of TI in analog and embedded processing along with its base in IC and MEMS manufacturing. These are the spaces where TI is focusing in today’s economic environment with tough competition and falling profit margins. It has set its vision on high profitability and longer life cycle segments such as automotive, industrial, medical, home, office, avionics etc. with a winning strategy in the ‘internet-of-everything’ revolution in near future. The DSP technology is a game of programming, the use of DSP in a cellphone or an audio system or an industrial control unit depends on how it is programmed. TI has an edge to produce DSPs for variety of applications.

In 2013, TI drew its ~80% (79% to be precise) revenue from analog and embedded market. In analog, it is leading with ~17% market share out of ~$40B market and in embedded ~14% market share out of ~$17B market. The market is fragmented, but is large with good growth potential and cushion for long term profitability. TI is investing and strengthening in these areas and who knows it may strike gold.

In the analog space, TI leads in voltage regulators and power management solution. It offers power-efficient LED lighting and other high performance and high volume analog solutions. In the embedded market, TI leads in DSPs along with specialized microcontroller solution that integrates analog components and sensors together.

Considering a tremendous growth opportunity in IoT market and its requirement for low power microcontrollers, TI is expanding its embedded product portfolio; recently it added Hercules[SUP]TM[/SUP]MCU RM57Lx and TMS570LCx into its microcontroller offering that are with 32-bit dual-core processors which provide ~50% increased performance over previous MCUs. They also provide largest on-chip memory and several other safety features for industrial, automotive, avionics and medical applications. TI’s revenue growth in embedded processing seems to be increasing rapidly – ~8.5% y-o-y in 2013 and ~17% q-o-q in Q1 of 2014!

Fingers crossed; let’s see which turn TI takes to reap the benefits from automotive, industrial, medical, transportation, home and other applications in the backdrop of IoT. Comments are welcome!

More Articles by Pawan Fangaria…..

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TSMC vs Intel vs Samsung FinFETs

TSMC vs Intel vs Samsung FinFETs
by Daniel Nenni on 06-08-2014 at 10:50 am
Categories: Foundries, TSMC

By definition the pure-play foundry business model separates the design and manufacturing of a semiconductor device. TSMC was the first dedicated (pure-play) foundry which enabled the incredible fabless semiconductor ecosystem we have today. If not for the fabless business model we would not have the supercomputer class mobile devices in our pockets. We, as integral parts of the fabless semiconductor ecosystem, have changed the world, absolutely.

So the question is: As an executive for a fabless semiconductor company, why would you even consider turning back the clock and renting fab space from an IDM (a company that both designs and manufactures semiconductor devices)?

As a student of history I have always felt that it is critical to understand how you got to where you are today in order to predict where you will be tomorrow. As a 30 year veteran of Silicon Valley I have seen many companies succeed but I have also seen many more fail due to one fundamental truth, they failed at the future. In writing “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry” Paul McLellan and I both agree that the key to the fabless business model is competition. Unfortunately, at 28nm there was no real foundry competition and that has opened the foundry business doors to IDMs once again.

You can’t fault TSMC. They executed at 28nm and were rewarded with a dominant market position. Had GlobalFoundries been able to provide a competitive 28nm offering I would not be writing this blog. Trust me on this: fabless semiconductor companies would NOT even consider doing business with an IDM foundry if they had two or more leading edge pure-play foundry options.

Intel thinks they are clever by getting into the foundry business. Unfortunately Intel is being used as a pawn in a very high stakes game of foundry chess. I also believe this to be true in the SoC business but that is another blog. Samsung on the other hand is a chess grandmaster which puts Intel between a serious rock (Samsung) and a very hard place (TSMC). Take a close look at Samsung’s latest announcements:

Samsung ♥ GLOBALFOUNDRIES

Samsung Endorses FD-SOI!

Both are excellent moves in becoming an integral part of the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. Samsung is also the only foundry to show working 14nm Silicon at the Design Automation Conference last week. My sources tell me that Samsung 14nm is 3-6 months ahead of TSMC’s 16FF+. My sources also tell me that TSMC 16nm FF+ is today the most competitive FinFET offering, meaning power, performance, area, AND cost. This is based on information from the associated PDKs and not from PowerPoint slides or press releases.

Competition is what drives the fabless semiconductor ecosystem and I thank Intel and Samsung for the investments they have made. If not for that competitive pressure we would not have the ultra-aggressive FinFET process development schedule nor would we have the competitive wafer pricing I have seen of late. Unfortunately all FinFET processes are not created equal so it will be difficult for the fabless companies to design to multiple foundries which mean there will be clear winners and losers in this game. If this was a horse race and I had to make a bet today it would be TSMC to win, Samsung to place, and Intel will not even show. Just my opinion of course.

More Articles by Daniel Nenni…..

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Hogan’s Internet of Things Panel

Hogan’s Internet of Things Panel
by Paul McLellan on 06-06-2014 at 10:50 am
Categories: Events

Jim Hogan organized a panel on the Internet of Things (IoT) on Wednesday afternoon. The panellists were Randy Smith of Sonics, Bernard Murphy of Atrenta, Gary Smith (himself) and Frank Shirrmeister of Cadence.

Gary reckons that IoT is a Wall Street buzzword being used to get stock prices up. If you go to a series of presentations of IoT you will realize that they are all talking about something different. So IoT is not a market, medical is a market, mil-aero is a market, automotive is a market and so on.

Frank is skeptical that it will fill fabs since typically these are not large expensive chips. He sees it as hierarchical, with the sensor devices with some compute power linked to a hub (cellphone, computer or living room) and then uplink from there to the cloud. Cloud services are an important part of IoT.

Bernard beat the drum for security. IoT represents a new challenge for security since if you believe the numbers there will be something like a trillion edge nodes. So it looks more like a biological system and perhaps we need to start to think of security the same way as a body with localized defenses, signalling mechanisms, and not the brittle way that anti-virus is done with simple signatures today. Security is better with diversity so cannot have a single means of attack.

Randy sees changes in the market with system companies building chip teams (e.g. Apple, Google, Amazon). It is system companies that know their markets and a lot will be high-volume consumer with very short time to market. IoT will need the equivalent of agile software development but for hardware.

Everyone agreed that verticalization has been a trend for years, especially in the area of design above RTL which can be very market specific. Clearly need cosimulation with sensors, analog etc to be able to do the architectural design.

Power is clearly going to be a big issue. Gary pointed out that servers are not a major driver of the ITRS roadmap. Many will be heterogeneous, designed for specific functions.

The design cycles will be short so this is a real opportunity for FPGAs (although, of course, power is the weakness of FPGAs which inevitably are somewhat wasteful compared to custom gates).

Gary pointed out we are starting to have cross industry competition. The car guys want you to buy a car that has all the electronics and you pay a subscription (think onStar). The phone people want all the smarts in apps on your phones and a receptacle in the car to plug it in.

Software is going to be a big part of the market. Not clear what operating systems will be used or how money will be made. Is Mentor making real money in embedded? The embedded market put all the money into the RTOS and gave away tools and so when open source OS’s like Linux came along that business fell apart. The real business is the tools. Although architects write code in C++ they are actually doing hardware design.

The challenge for the tools are to bring software and analog/sensor closer together. This are probably teams that are not going to buy an emulator.

Economics of designing “smart dust” may need one company, not layers of integration. Build sensor, processor, radio, OS all in one place.


More articles by Paul McLellan…

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Seen at DAC! Self-Driving Cars –Victory Lap or Pile-Up?

Seen at DAC! Self-Driving Cars –Victory Lap or Pile-Up?
by Holly Stump on 06-05-2014 at 6:00 pm
Categories: Automotive, Events

It is axiomatic that the DAC vendor community would love to serve the exciting and expanding automotive market; and the auto community would love to continue to increase their value through innovative software/ hardware solutions, which will one day lead to the self-driving car. But how do we team to lap the track?

Jim Hogan set the stage for the Heroes DAC panel with the scope of the automotive challenge, both software and hardware… stressing that software defines user experiences.

Alain Labat, Managing Director at Harvest Management Partners, LLC. spoke to some current statistics on the growth of software complexity in automotive, with actual, hot off the presses data..

All leading to the much-bemoaned software productivity gap…



Virtual prototyping was identified and discussed as one key technology solution to address this software productivity gap. Its ability to accelerate embedded software development, and unify the development chain across multiple groups and companies, will be increasingly necessary.

Dr. Sridhar Jagannathan, Chief Innovation Officer and EVP at Persistent Systems, then asked “How Intelligent is Your Car? And Is Your Car More Intelligent than You?”

He introduced an innovative new concept, VIQ® – Vehicle Intelligence Quotient® (Persistent.) VIQ is a new four-axis scale for measuring and comparing intelligence of cars, as shown below. And you may even be able to compare your own IQ with your car’s VIQ!



And Martin Baker, Senior Manager of Ecosystem and Business Management at Renesas, probed three critical societal and technology questions…

Why do we need self-driving cars?

  • Safety, with 1.2M deaths and 20-50M injuries peryear
  • Time
  • Congestion
  • Emissions/fuel economy

How might self-driving cars evolve? We have many of the pieces today – it is an evolution, to integrate and grant greater control authority to the vehicle.

Phase 1: Driver Awareness -> Car assumes control in specific situations

  • “Cocooning”- Driver keeps control in normalcase, car intervenes in emergency
  • Adaptive cruise, lane keeping, blind spot,navigation -> supercruise
  • Emergency brake assist, lane keeping -> traffic jam assist
  • Auto park
  • Meanwhile, Google car is an interesting approach to specific situations

Phase 2: Autonomous driving car

Phase 3: Adding V2x communication

  • Initially to enhance driver’s/car’s situational awareness
  • Then, co-ordinated behavior between cars –platooning, route co-ordination, junction co-ordination etc.

Enablers……Hardware enablers for self-driving cars include:

  • Computing power – High end SoCs with dedicatedimage processing, sensor fusion capabilities, high efficiency (R-car Gen 2)
  • Bandwidth – Ethernet AVB, largely in silicon
  • Off-board communications – V2V, V2x
  • Safety – to ASIL D (RH850 P1x), mixedcriticality
  • Security – in silicon (RH850)

Software enablers include:

  • Safety.ASIL D, fail operational
  • Model-based development
  • Building blocks already in place
  • Over the air updates, with security
  • Ability to detect and respond to new security threats

Martin also discussed EDA, and how the industry must address development challenges, especially dramatically more software; requirements formore integration across multiple systems and partners; and ISO 26262, which will evolve.

It was acknowledged that automotive requires a step change in speed and efficiency. This will entail a new Development Ecosystem, and partnerships for innovative tools and processes, addressing automation; virtualization;integration; affordability; and accessibility.

A general call to action was proposed, with collaboration between EDA solutions companies, and the automotive players.



Panelists

  • Martin Baker, Senior Manager of Ecosystem andBusiness Management at Renesas, a leader in automotive semiconductortechnology. Martin spent 25 year at Ford Motor Company where he was global headof embedded software, process and tools, electrical architecture and Europeanhead of electrical system integration.Martin was CEO at Invirtech and led the Automotive Business Unit atPacific Insight Electronics.
  • Alain Labat, Managing Director at HarvestManagement Partners, LLC. Previously, Alain was President and CEO of VaSTSystems (now Synopsys), providing embedded software and virtualizationtechnology to automotive and other applications.Alain was CEO and Co-founder of SequenceDesign and was SVP at Synopsys and VP at Valid Logic Systems (now Cadence).
  • Dr. Sridhar Jagannathan, Chief InnovationOfficer and EVP at Persistent Systems. Sridhar is responsible for new models ofinnovation and growth at Persistent, which has a strong consulting practicearea in automotive. Previously: Vice President, CTO Office at Intuit, Inc.;Managing Director for Symantec’s India Development Center for consumerproducts; Vice President of Technology for Softbank Emerging Markets Fund; andTechnical Director for Internet & eCommerce at Oracle.


Also read: Google Robot Cars are Coming!


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The Best and Worst of #51DAC!

The Best and Worst of #51DAC!
by Daniel Nenni on 06-05-2014 at 4:00 pm
Categories: Events

When people ask which DAC is the most memorable I used to say my first because I was a new college grad and it really was exciting. The next DAC was memorable since it was in Las Vegas and my beautiful wife joined me. This year was DAC number 30 for me and of course it will be the most memorable since I signed hundreds of copies of “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry” during the book signing Tuesday night and signed more just walking around the exhibit hall, and for that I thank everyone.

When Paul McLellan, Daniel Payne and I started blogging on SemiWiki in 2011 we wanted to bring social media to the semiconductor industry. It was our feeling that if you wanted to get the younger generation involved you had to speak their language. Fortunately I have four children who taught me how to speak it and now SemiWiki has surpassed the one million user milestone. What an amazing experience this has been, absolutely.

When Paul McLellan, Beth Martin, and I decided to write a book the motivation really was to bring the history of the fabless semiconductor industry to an even wider audience. We made good progress this week by giving away 1,500 books with the help of eSilicon, Atrenta, Tanner EDA, Solido, and EDA Direct. Online sales of the eBook had another spike this week as well and for that I again thank you all.

DAC seemed to be somewhat “mature” this year (I’m surprised AARP did not have a booth) but the technical content was very good based on the presentations I attended. The foundries were the stars of the show in my opinion. TSMC, Samsung, and SMIC all had theaters with non-stop ecosystem presentations. I give the highest honors to Samsung since they showed working 14nm silicon in their booth. I also give best presentation to Philippe Magarshack for his talk on 28nm FD-SOI and very candid answers to my questions.

Where was Intel Foundry? They were doing what they do best, putting out EDA press releases that meant absolutely nothing.

My wife’s best DAC experience was handing out books and watching me sign them. Shushana was intimately involved in the publishing of the book so she knows what an effort it was. She also appreciated that the women’s bathrooms were never crowded. Her worst DAC experience was seeing John Cooley in cargo shorts, seriously, that has to stop. The best booth design/theme, according to my wife and I agree, was Ansys. Great design, very eye catching, very artistic.

The EDAC kick-off party was very good. My wife and I enjoyed listening to Sonia Harrison sing. We also spent quality time with some of the Heroes of EDA. The best party we attended was by ClioSoft at the Press Club. They gave away a pair of Google Glass! We also got a very nice bottle of La Follette Pinot Noir as a parting gift. This was a very classy affair by a very classy company. My wife and I skipped the mosh pit DAC parties and I skipped the dinners that did not also invite my wife. All-in-all a very entertaining week!

There will be many more #51DAC blogs to come so stay tuned. I just wanted to share a first glance and thank everyone involved. DAC is an institution that we should all support, absolutely.

Also read Impressions of #51DAC

More Articles by Daniel Nenni…..

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Embedded Vision Summit

Embedded Vision Summit
by Paul McLellan on 06-05-2014 at 2:32 pm
Categories: Cadence, EDA

I was a the embedded vision conference last week. Jeff Beir, the founder of the embedded vision alliance gave an introduction to the field. The conference was much bigger than previous years and almost everyone is designing some sort of vision product. Half of your brain is used for vision so it goes without saying that vision requires a lot of computation. It is the highest bandwidth input channel for devices that need to interact with the physical world.

Vision has been an active research field for a decade but processor performance has now got high enough that it is going mainstream. Processors are up at well over 10GMAC/second (TI’s are at 25GMAC/second) but that threshold was only passed relatively recently. In the real world, vision is hard with varying lighting, glare, fog and other challenges.

Yann LeCun of Facebook showed some of his research on recognition. There has been a revolution in the algorithms in the last couple of years. Yann had a demo with a camera attached to a laptop with a big nVidia graphics engine in being used to run the algorithms. He could point the camera at things and it would tell you what they were (keyboard, space-bar, pastry, shoe and so on). In real time.

Chris Rowen of Cadence/Tensilica presented on Taming the Beast: Performance and energy optimization across embedded feature detection and tracking. This was largely about how to use the Tensilica Image/Video Processor (IVP) for doing things like recognition and gesture tracking. The big challenge is to do this with really low power.


The most important three things are:
[LIST=1]

  • Exploit data locality (otherwise energy fetching data will swamp power and computation rates will slow)
  • Leverage libraries
  • Use tools in tuning

    I talked to Chris afterwards. He told me a bit more about the IVP. It has about 400 additional imaging instructions above the basic processor enabling new apps like that recognition. But power is the big challenge since we can’t put a full-blown nVidia graphics chip in our phones.

    We are going to end up with a hierarchy of power levels with micropower for always-on to know when the rest of the system should wake up (listening or looking, for example). Then there is the system itself, think of your phone. Finally uploading data to the cloud. But some processing has to be done locally, it is too expensive in both power and delay to transfer a whole video (or speech waveform) to the cloud uncompressed. So even with the cloud the power problems do not go away.


    More articles by Paul McLellan…

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    SystemC: User Group update from DAC

    SystemC: User Group update from DAC
    by John Swan on 06-05-2014 at 12:00 pm
    Categories: EDA, Events

    I always enjoy attending the SystemC User group to see what is being done by users of SystemC. This time was no exception. Not only is it FREE, but the professional networking around the meeting, presentations, and break times are terrific.

    There were 5 paper presentations at the North American SystemC User Group (NASCUG) on Monday, including an Accellera standards update from Shishpal Rawat, Chair of Accellera. NASCUG is collocated at DAC. I am on committee for reviewing the presentations. Thanks goes to David Black, of Doulos, for Chairing this event.

    The full agenda is posted at www.nascug.org and the presentations will be made available within a week.

    A highlight for me was the keynote paper on UVM in SystemC. This is a new work by Fraunhofer and gaining wider support within Europe, was done primarily to allow UVM to be extended to the system level. UVM in SystemVerilog is viewed as a block level verification solution. This work has been contributed to Accellera which plans a vote this fall on establishing it as the UVM standard for SystemC.

    The UVM in SystemC has not yet been benchmarked against UVM in SystemVerilog. Up to now they have been focusing on making the implementation fully compatible with the existing UVM standard. Would you like to give it a try?

    Additionally, Intel is working on Out-of-Order parallel simulation in SystemC in order to take better advantage of the multicore processors available today while keeping with the sc_thread and sc_method without change. As you can imagine, this takes a more intelligent compiler that can smartly look for data dependencies at a higher level of granularity. However, when unknowns such as pointers are used, it reverts to not using OoO execution for that. Standard parallel execution can give a speedup of 14x running on 2 Intel® Xeon X5650 CPUs with 6×2 cores each. Using Intel’s OoO execution approach this increases to about 80x speedup. Other tests show a greater improvement. Through my activities I am aware that Intel has been at the forefront of advanced design methodologies. Intel is partnered with the Center for Embedded Computer Systems, University of California, Irvine on this effort.


    Finally, but important to me, was there were two presentations on High Level Synthesis (HLS) at this NASCUG. I was glad to see more work being done on HLS friendly IP. In this case CircuitSutra has developed an AMBA AXI4 bus that uses HLS. This provides more flexibility and hides the detailed protocol details from the user. Similarly, NEC‘s CyberWorkBench HLS tool suite provides a bus generator, the output of which feeds into their HLS tool. A user simply does a read(x,y) or write(x,y) to the bus without concern for the protocol details. Additionally AdaptIP is focused on developing IP using an HLS flow. I have plans to visit them at the IP community at DAC today. See my blog on the HLS for IP Panel in the DAC Pavilion here.

    Please review the NASCUG presentations when you see they are posted (I hope soon) and let me know here what you think. I will post a comment when the presentation slides become available.

    lang: en_US