Apr
The press release said what?
In one of my Internet searches, I locate all news stories related to ESL (minus the English as a Second Language references). Today I saw a press release from Fujitsu that looked interesting “Fujitsu Develops Chip-Simulation Environment for Mobile Phones”. Great I thought – an endorsement for ESL simulation, perhaps talks about SystemC or transaction modeling. That may be a good reference to keep.
So I start to read the article. It correctly identifies the problems – how do you make it both fast and accurate which leads to a second problem how do you know what accurate means when you have not yet designed and implemented it. I think my pulse even raced a little with anticipation about how they had resolved this. But then realization struck that this was not a real article – it was a piece of marketing fluff that was designed to try and impress the world about how great their methodology was and they had no intention to tell anyone about what they had done at all. Not a single piece of hard data – except for the claim that they can simulate 1 second of real time in dozens of minutes rather than several days for the old models.
The closest it comes to saying anything about what they did is contained in one cryptic sentence “By editing a program region that describes the operating patterns of the component, the user can control how that component will behave when embedded in the model.” So basically editing a model changes the behavior of the model – wow. The only other clue comes from the following sentence “system performance will be affected by factors such as the following: processing units that divide the data, the interval at which they are transmitted, and where they are inserted into the system bus.” So perhaps that tells us that this is transaction level simulation, but that is hardly new or press release worthy.
I think Fujitsu just wasted 20 minutes of my life. Not perhaps the reaction they wanted from a press release, but it has certainly changed my opinion of them.
Talking about press releases and time wasting, it reminds me the Cadence “Introducing Dynamic Power Analysis” press release on http://www.chipdesignmag.com/display.php?articleId=3118 ? The subtitle is: Using High-Performance System-Level Power Estimation to Build Leaner, Meaner, and Greener Products.
April 17th, 2009 at 4:10 amIt starts well, describing the issues for today’s chip architects that need fast and productive ways to estimate power early. But there is no happy end, the proposed solution is ‘optionally’ to use Cadence C-To-Silicon Compiler and end up with their Palladium III hardware emulation engine and RTL compiler power estimation capabilities.
This is not what I would call a “System-Level Power Estimation” solution.
If there were no links to a white paper, or better yet, online access to their simulation environment to try it out, it was a waste of time. It was a waste of your time to read the release, but also a waste for them to write and send it out.
Having said that though, your expectations of what you should get out of a press release are way too high IMHO. The release actually did part of its job – it got your attention. Where it failed is in getting you to a place where your curiosity could be satiated.
Of course, a link to a Fujitsu online Lab hosted within Xuropa (http://www.xuropa.com) would be the ideal. There’s nothing better than trying the technology out in an environment that also provides the white papers, tech docs, etc.
- James
April 17th, 2009 at 2:14 pmHey, I wonder if Ray Salemi liked it. After all, without the “self-appointed arbiters of truth” to screen that kind of stuff, that’s what we can expect to see.
Remember, engineers are trained to build stuff. they aren’t trained to communicate what the value is. so unless they are ready to go back to school to study philosophy, history, communication theory, statistics, economics and political science (which I had to do in my journalism major) maybe we need to get a few more arbiters into the mix.
April 20th, 2009 at 4:48 pm