Panel: The ESDA Landscape: Who Will Dominate?

Electronic Systems Design Automation (ESDA) is a current cause celebre of the EDA industry. This panel first attempts to identify: "What is the principal problem in ESDA?" In fact, there are a number of emerging problems which are naturally considered to be within the domain of ESDA. Principally these include hardware-software co-design, representation of systems at higher levels of abstraction and links through synthesis to implementation paths in hardware and in software. Hardware-software co-design itself has a number of important sub-problems such as the co-synthesis and co-verification of systems of hardware and software. Representing systems at higher-levels of abstraction requires the ability to naturally express dataflow representations of sub-systems, control flow representations of sub-systems and modeling software executing on instruction-set processors. Probably of even greater concern to the audience is the question: "Which commercial vendor is best poised to address these problems?" Among current commercial EDA vendors, iLogix has established a strong presence in modeling the control-flow portion of systems, but not the dataflow. Conversely, the SPW tool of the Alta Group, the COSSAP tool of Synopsys and the DSP-oriented toolset of Mentor's European Design Center, have each shown successes in modeling the dataflow portions of systems but not the control flow. Finally the Race and Reveal tools of Redwood, now a part of the Alta Group, seem best suited to modeling instruction-set processors. In short, each of the major commercial vendors have provided solutions to some portions of the ESDA-related problems but none has yet been able to provide a comprehensive solution. The two problems of defining ESDA and determining commercial dominance will be discussed by the top engineering representatives of each of the major commercial players. In addition one of the best known researchers in the area, Prof. Jan Rabaey, will help to clearly identify the principal problems of ESDA. Gary Smith, one of the major analysts of the ESDA industry, will provide his own candid perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of the vendors entering this arena.