Models from the IP vendor are the ideal in many cases, not just for the configurable IP business. But sometimes the IP vendors do not feel like releasing models, or the chips in question are old hat. For example, someone using an oldish Intel chipset along with some standard x86 processor and then a pile of custom ASICs, FPGAs, and standard network controllers to build a board… there is no real “IP” being bought here, really just standard chips.

What is the model here that makes sense? Right now, it seems to be tool vendors or consultants building these models from the manuals and providing them to the needy software developers. This tends to get resolved simply because the value of doing software development on a model is so great that procuring the models is less of a problem. Just pay someone to do it. And twist some arms to get hte documentation needed.

Marketing comes up with a grand idea. Then if you are into the whole ESL thing, you almost immediately want to start slinging prototypes around, exploring the performance, maybe running snippets of algorithms, exploring the bandwidth issues and other performance corners that are the focus of much of the back and forth of the initial system and architectural design.

Peripherals on the boundaries of the chip functionality can be happily abstracted away to a large degree, but models of those core bits that really influence the performance are key. Worse still when you are considering evaluating different options from external IP vendors.

The models are never ready when you want them, usually because the companies are still designing the IP and either do their design first and create a model last, or wrote the model in some other language than the one you want to use, for a customer that uses a different interface or hooks up to a different sort of modeling tool.

All of these are very solvable problems and can easily be worked around with a 6 month lead time and some money and engineers thrown at the problem.

But for system design, you need those models now and you’d better be finished in 6 months time or maybe turning it into a nearly final virtual prototype to be starting your software development.

The killer for ESL IP availability, if you want to be using anywhere near current IP or the latest and greatest processors is the complete lack of lead time on the need for models. Excel almost always wins that race.

Do tools make it easier to write and use models? I would suggest that tools can add to the cost of developing models because many of the value add features require the model developer learn and use proprietary APIs. This is a significant burden when the model is to be reused in several different tools. In ESL, interoperability extends far beyond the transaction interfaces. We still must take huge strides in interoperability for model configuration, instrumentation and debug.