Multicore, ESL and EDA-Broad Brush Techniques Required

Multicore means everything or nothing depending on your position in the semiconductor foodchain. Ofcourse since the real world in not bi-polar, there are always areas of grey in between, where you could be multi-something and still be a player in the world of multicore design. Last week's multicore expo had vendors coming from various parts of the design and manufacturing chain who all claimed to be have a multicore or multicore related solution in some shape or form.

The multicore expo has been growing steadily since it first started up 3 or 4 years ago, both in terms of participants in the expo and attendees. As the importance of multicore parts in mainstream products grows, this is inevitable. From being used in data intensive and graphics intensive high end applications, primarily for networking and consumer products, we are now seeing multicore products enter other vertical markets.

Now all multicore isnt the same. There are homogenous multicore SoCs and heterogenous multicore SoCs. Ecosystem support for these platforms is still evolving so the success or failure of a particular vendor depends on the vendor's ability to generate enough ecosystem support.

So where do ESL and EDA fit in? A panel at the same conference explored the connection between ESL and multicore. The panel itself turned out to be very entertaining thanks to the lively debate that raged among the participants who came from different parts of the design universe. The key, as Grant Martin pointed out, was that no one raised a quibble about the connection between ESL and designing multicore systems- it was taken as a given - a far cry from the days that John Cooley dismissed ESL as a buzzword with no substance. I'll dive into the details of the panel discussions in the next post.