EDA focus shifts to system level design

Walden Rhines, Mentor Graphics
2/16/2011 8:55 AM EST

Companies designing complex electronics always face numerous challenges, which keep evolving, because each problem solved enables new advances that in turn lead to new challenges. The year ahead will see increased system engineering content in chip- and board-level designs.

Problems that used to be solvable at the physical or register transfer level (RTL) are now being increasingly impacted by system architecture. Much of the challenge of low power design used to be limited to the physical implementation, but now the primary impact is at the system architecture level. As a result, system design trade-offs are becoming an increasingly important part of the job of the chip designer.

In 2011 and beyond, more and more of the design task will entail evaluating the chip architecture at the system level to optimize power and performance.

Previously, chip designers used to work independently from the embedded software developers. Now the development and verification of embedded software with hardware is the largest component of chip and system design.

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