Taken for Granted

I’m starting this blog sitting in one of the near-final technical sessions at DAC, and will continue it no doubt when I get home.

To start with, here is an image that will no doubt remind many of DAC:

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Children’s Games, 1560

Although DAC covers many aspects of EDA, ESL and some focus on processors and IP, from my perspective I would say this was a DAC of ESL and multicore. I’m going to write on these two topics in more detail in other forums, but for now I would focus on two developments in each area:

ESL: 1. I heard from colleagues that there was so much interest in the Sunday workshop on High-level Synthesis that it was the best-attended workshop and the room was packed. I was not able to attend myself due to other commitments, but I also heard from others that they think the interest in high-level synthesis has been growing quite strongly and the use of it has been increasing.

2. The announcement by OSCI of TLM 2.0 now being available looks to be a significant milestone in ESL development. I have to still get back to the office and download the production kit and documentation to take a detailed look at the final product, but there were a number of ESL tool companies announcing support and quite a bit of user buzz about the capability, including an interesting user panel at the OSCI lunchtime session on Monday.

Multicore: 1. Interest in multicore at DAC has bifurcated into two areas: “Manycore” for EDA application using large servers or multicore processors scaling beyond 16 cores to 32, 64 +, and also using GPUs (Graphic Processing units from vendors such as NVidia). From Chris Malakowsky’s talk at the DAC Chairs reception Sunday evening to several technical sessions and presentations, this area is growing with real EDA applications ported to real machines and with quantifiable benefits in many parts of the design flow.

2. The other area for Multicore is the design of Multi-processor systems (e.g. MPSoC), including use of configurable processors. The SASP symposium on Sunday and Monday dealt in this topic and there were a number of very interesting sessions and panels that dealt with multicore SoC design. DAC is building a strong programme in this area.

I have enjoyed my time at DAC this week and am looking forward to next year in San Francisco in late July. To those who missed it, the proceedings and videos of some of the sessions and some of the many blogs about it should go some way to making up for missing it - but try to come next year.