Importance of Embedded SW and apps in Electronics

BANGALORE, INDIA: From mobile phones to infotainment devices in cars, from digital cameras to heart monitors, from e-readers to network-aware televisions, our world is shaped by increasingly sophisticated and interlinked electronic devices. A world without devices that were inconceivable just 10 or 20 years ago would be intolerable today.

The systems and semiconductor companies that shaped this electronics revolution have not only increased functionality exponentially, but have also slashed costs to the point where a few dollars today can purchase more computing power than millions of dollars could 30 years ago.

Today, systems and semiconductor companies are undergoing a disruptive transformation so profound that even the best-known companies will be impacted. It begins with a shift from ‘design creation’ to ‘integration’ in the electronic systems industry, and results in a new focus on profitability. This realization, in turn, opens the way to EDA360, a new vision for what the EDA industry can become.

Some innovators will redefine themselves as integrators. They will integrate at the silicon, SoC, and system levels. They will make heavy use of externally designed silicon and software intellectual property, they will tend to stay at mature process nodes, and they will invest heavily in embedded software development.

They will become application-focused platform providers, not “chip” providers. These integrators must reach an elusive profitability target and get there through rapid integration without sacrificing quality or schedule.

The integration task involves a different set of challenges than creation. Integrators need to be able to locate IP, evaluate it, and source it more effectively than they ever have before. They need to integrate IP into their platform hardware, using whatever configurability is required.

They need to verify and test their platforms and SoCs. Integrators also need to integrate and verify embedded software. Furthermore, since all real-world consumer applications involve both analog and digital circuitry, integrators will need to build and verify “mixed-signal” platforms.

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While traditional EDA focuses on engineering teams only, going forward, it should provide capabilities for project and business management. It should reach across a customer’s entire global organization - engineers, project managers, and corporate leaders - to enable profitability and competitiveness in these challenging times. It should support three important capabilities:

* System Realization is the development of a complete hardware/software platform that will provide all necessary support for end-user applications. The platform includes one or more SoCs developed through SoC Realization, and adds an embedded software infrastructure that typically includes an OS, middleware, and reference applications. System Realization is driven by the applications that will run on the completed system. To be successful, it requires enterprise-level program management.

* SoC Realization is the completion of an individual SoC (or alternative packaging choice, such as 3DIC). Along with the integration of silicon IP developed through Silicon Realization, SoC Realization includes “bare-metal software” such as drivers and diagnostics. In the EDA360 vision, an Open Integration Platform facilitates IP integration into SoCs.

* Silicon Realization represents everything it takes to get a design into silicon. The result could be an analog or digital IP block for an SoC, an IP subsystem, or a complete IC without embedded software. Silicon Realization increasingly involves the creation and integration of large and complex digital, analog, and mixed-signal IP blocks. It goes well beyond conventional “mixed-signal” designs that integrate a few small analog blocks into a digital SoC.

It’s important to note that today no single vendor can provide all the solutions that are needed for hardware/software creation, integration, and verification. That is especially true at the System Realization level, where both embedded software and hardware expertise are required.

Cadence recently announced a technical collaboration with Wind River that aims to integrate the Cadence Incisive Software Extensions and Wind River’s Simics virtual platform. This joint approach is expected to allow engineers to develop electronic designs on a virtual platform well in advance of hardware availability and improves the productivity of system engineers with planning, management, stimulus, checking and monitoring of unique hardware/software use cases.

This level of cooperation is essential for improving system-level schedule predictability while reducing risk, and marks the first of many upcoming collaborative ventures in the Cadence system realization ecosystem. 
Ecosystem collaboration will be essential for success, as open standards that provide choice for customers. EDA vendors will need to partner with embedded software companies, IP providers, and customers and enable consumer delight.