Virtual Ducks in a Row

Hardware has long been the bane of electronic design automation (EDA) vendors, despite the fact that EDA tools exist to make hardware design easier. Companies such as Valid Logic and Mentor Graphics, who dominated electronic design in the 1980s, discovered a while back that it was to their disadvantage to couple their software to specific hardware platforms. Valid Logic has since been absorbed into Cadence Design Systems, and Mentor has evolved to an open platform strategy. A few EDA companies have produced hardware tools, such as logic modelers and hardware accelerators, to aid the design process, but these companies have either been swallowed up by larger organizations or have struggled along with indifferent success.

As the concept of hardware/software codesign gains momentum, EDA vendors are reexamining hardware tools as a means of accelerating the design process, with their interest focused on logic emulation. A logic emulation system is an expensive box usually full of field-programmable gate arrays that is fed a net list and configured to emulate a chip design. Microprocessor designers, who can afford these expensive toys, use logic emulation, as do some companies building systems containing large ASICs. Logic emulators are scaleable systems that allow you to spend more and more money as your designs increase in size. What they offer is the ability to speed up the design process by letting you develop software on virtual machines. Typically, you plug a box containing your (eventual) chip design into the target system via a ribbon cable, then run software on this system v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, somewhere in the range of 1 to 2MHz.

Quickturn Design Systems owns the lion's share of the logic emulation business, having devoured its only (aptly named) competition, PIE Design, about four years ago. But EDA vendors hate to see a single company dominate a niche, no matter how small. New emulation companies are popping up all over the place. Almost as quickly, these companies are snatched up by larger tool vendors. Over the past three years or so, Synopsys has acquired Arkos, a logic emulation startup that to my knowledge never shipped a product; Zycad has purchased British logic emulation vendor Inca; Mentor Graphics has bought an obscure French logic emulator company called Meta Systems; and Ikos Systems is in the process of acquiring an even more obscure logic emulation startup called Virtual Machine Works. Why all this interest in logic emulation? Although this niche generated only $65 million in 1994, as reported in EETimes, Dataquest estimates that the figure will climb to a whopping $173 million in 1999 (there goes that hockey-stick curve again). These numbers are not lost on EDA vendors.

Higher integration, more complex designs, and shorter design cycles are all driving the need for better design methodologies. As design tool vendors see the need for (and potential revenues of) tools that facilitate the codesign and verification of hardware and software, they are getting their virtual ducks in a row. Design methodology changes are afoot. The question that remains is what role will software engineers have in the decisions about new design methodologies and the tools that will become available to implement the methodologies?