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System on a Chip Concurrent Development
An anonymous reader writes "The old silo method of chip development, with hardware and firmware developers barely interacting with each other, won't cut it in today's fast-moving industry. IBM DeveloperWorks has the third in a series of articles about system-on-a-chip design. The author, Sam Siewert, displays the development tools and processes that speed system on a chip design and get all your developers working together effectively."
The concept of software/hardware codesign is not a new one. I would say that every project I have worked on for the past 20 years has been a software/hardware codesign project, regardless of whether it was an SoC or some other hardware system. In every case, I have seen the software start running shortly after the new hardware is powered up. Fast software boot is a validation that you did the design correctly, but it should not be viewed as an amazing feat. It should be an expected outcome that was planned for. Those who design in "silos" are doing it the wrong way from the start and are asking for problems.
Within the last 5 years or so, there has been a lot of hype about System-on-Chip (SoC) development. There have been lots of SoC articles, and many companies trying to sell tools to develop SoC's. But when I read through most of the hype, I find nothing all that revolutionary about the tools and methods. Chip fabrication has reached the point where one can integrate a lot of functionality on a chip, but the design methodologies for successful designs are still basically the same as the past non-integrated designs. Mistakes are less forgiving in an SoC since rework is very difficult or impossible, so the design verification requirements need to be thorough. Most design successes that I have seen have been more dependent on the thoroughness of the design team than the tools used. The best tools in the world will not save you from the blunders of bad designers.
Check out these guys who're doing just about that. Way cool stuff (disclaimer, used to work there, etc.)
Jon