EDA and Systems Design Converge...Or Do They?

By _EETimes Ron Wilson

August 11, 2010

For decades systems designers and IC designers have taken different paths. The former have relied primarily on block-level schematics for hardware definition. Except for teams facile in FPGAs, they have treated the chips in their designs as frozen blocks. For verification they have trusted prototypes over any form of simulation.

In contrast, IC designers long ago moved to language-based hardware description—first to describe the flow of data through registers in a synchronous digital design, and later to describe the function and interconnection of blocks at behavioral level. These designers, constrained by the multi-million-dollar costs of building a prototype IC to see how it works, rely on software simulation and formal analysis as verification tools, selectively using FPGA-based prototypes to complement these approaches.

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