By Ed Sperling
System-Level Design sat down to discuss hardware and software priorities with Neil Hand, group director for marketing for Cadence’s SoC realization; Johannes Stahl, director of product marketing for system-level solutions at Synopsys; Prasad Subramaniam, vice president of design technology at eSilicon; and Bernard Murphy, CTO at Atrenta. What follows are excerpts of that conversation

SLD: Who makes the money as the value shifts inside of SoCs and devices?
Subramaniam: The system makers still make the money. They are offering value with the software and the whole system.
Stahl: It’s the companies that have unique control points.
Murphy: The guy making the hardware is not necessarily making the money, whereas Google is.
Hand: It depends how you define the system. With Android it may be the ecosystem. But in other industries the system maker may be the ecosystem, like in automotive or medical. People always thought the system maker is whoever makes the hardware, but it’s changing to whatever the ecosystem has enabled.
Subramaniam: The system maker is not just delivering the hardware. It’s delivering the entire solution.
Hand: But one of the changes is that the system maker may not deliver the hardware at all. They may be delivering hardware from other people.
Subramaniam: Yes, that’s possible now.
Hand: Is HTC delivering the hardware, or are they just an enabler for Verizon’s ecosystem?
Subramaniam: And if you look at Apple, they design the products, but those products are made by someone else. But Apple does provide the hardware, the software and all the content. They’re not creating the content, but they’re making it available to you. They’ve created the entire system for their end application.
Hand: It’s the same with Sony. They pioneered that idea after Betamax when they started buying the studios and the content providers. Apple has out-executed them.
Murphy: No one has been able to reproduce the Apple model.

SLD: In the chip world, who makes the money?
Hand: Whoever can deliver differentiation. If you deliver differentiation, people will pay for it. If it becomes a ‘me too,’ no one wins.
Subramaniam: It’s differentiation plus value. Conventional wisdom is that as you go up the value chain there’s more opportunity to create value and you will create more profits.
Hand: We believe there’s a limit of what you can achieve through pure automation of designs, though, which is where IP fits in. For other people it will be the software. Different companies will take different tacks to deliver that value to the end user.
Stahl: It will be companies with a structural advantage, such as TSMC or ARM. They have the scale and deployment in the industry.

SLD: The other side of this is where EDA companies make their investments.
Stahl: That’s why we invest in IP. Virtual prototyping will pay off over time, too. The structural advantage of having enough is very important.
Hand: We’ve invested in IP and the system development suites. We believe the investment is in the SoC and the system, in addition to our traditional business.
Murphy: IP won’t be just hardware. It will also include software.

SLD: So where will the biggest breaking points be in the future?
Subramaniam: Technology is still evolutionary. I don’t expect any revolutionary tools to come out. Maybe with 3D ICs there will be something new required, but even 3D ICs are evolutionary. Most problems there can be addressed using existing tools with some additions. Maybe at some point when Moore’s Law is gone and we’ve come up with a new kind of transistor then we’ll have a new industry for EDA and design. Until then, things will be more or less similar.
Stahl: We’re seeing semiconductor makers growing their software development at a phenomenal pace. The way many companies are attacking the problem is more bodies on the problem, but the more intelligent companies are asking whether you can afford to do software the same way over and over. Do you need to be more methodical and what are the connection points between normal software engineering and the platform? How much can you systematically verify and test? There’s a lot of realization among managers, who now also have to run software teams, that they can apply the lessons of EDA to this business. There’s the biggest potential, but it will be an evolutionary change. We won’t be able to brainwash the software engineers to use a different language.
Subramaniam: The one thing that can happen in software is that with silicon so cheap you can have lots of little processors doing specialized tasks. One of the challenges of software is how to take advantage of all of these little machines in silicon and get the best productivity out of the tools. There is an opportunity for multicore software development where you start with a high-level language and break it down into millions of little problems. This is not an easy problem. People have been trying to do this for 25 to 30 years.
Stahl: People need to be much more conscious of how to validate this heterogeneous system to make sure it really runs, but at the end of the day you have to do more brute force simulation. We cannot afford to wait to start developing software until silicon is there.
Hand: If you look at base stations, they broke those designs into lots of small DSPs, each doing one part of the design chain. That has a parallel today. As the software becomes more and more complicated, it changes from IP to a subsystem that is validated and trusted. It’s tested, good and encapsulated. People don’t violate the rules that are in there. That’s where you get much closer collaboration between hardware and software.
Stahl: Some companies like Ericsson have a discipline of developing large-scale hardware and software. That has to be transferred to the semiconductor large software stacks. It’s a discipline.
Murphy: It’s a little bit of, ‘To a hammer everything looks like a nail.’ If there was a better understanding of the system problem they would realize that turning all the design knobs isn’t as easy as it looks.
Hand: Years ago it used to be easier to fix something in hardware than in software. A semiconductor company doesn’t necessarily look at those tradeoffs today.
Murphy: They know what they can fix. The universe of possible fixes is bounded.

SLD: Using software for specific processors or functions seems to be a radical shift.
Subramaniam: The advantage of having hundreds of processors on a chip may be a little bit wasteful, but it actually saves you power. Rather than one 1GHz processor running at 50% activity you can have hundreds of 100 MHz processors running at 2% activity and burning very little power.
Stahl: I don’t see any of these homogeneous processors in the consumer space. It’s one processor at a time optimized and running all the software. Incremental design tactics won’t allow for that kind of radical shift.
Hand: I don’t think it’s radical. It can happen at an evolutionary scale. Today you have multiple processors handling the baseband and the touchscreen. They do have isolated functions with their own function.
Stahl: But it’s still very heterogeneous.
Murphy: And with the high-end smart phone processors, you design in everything and you either take stuff out or you disable it.
Hand: It’s a tough call even where you have hundreds of distributed processors. How flexible will it be if you can’t break down an application into a bunch of little pieces?
Murphy: Another problem that comes up is in verifying subsystems. You can build a subsystem and test it, but you’re targeting a market window that is short. I haven’t seen many examples of subsystems that are significantly re-used from generation to generation. You’re back to verifying these huge systems.

Tags: 3D stacking, Apple, Atrenta, Cadence, Ericsson, eSilicon, HTC, IP, Software, Synopsys, virtual prototyping

This entry was posted on Friday, October 14th, 2011 at 8:16 am and is filed under Round Tables, Technology Features, Top Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.