Software signoff again

By _EDA Graffiti

September 24, 2009

What do you think the dominant design paradigm for electronic systems is going to be going forward?

As I’ve said before, I believe that it is going to be taking software, probably written in C  and C++, and synthesizing parts of it into FPGAs and compiling the rest into binary to run on processors in the FPGA. This is what I’ve been calling software signoff for a long time. It’s more than just the software necessary to run on the FPGA or SoC. It is signing off hardware that co-optimizes the software.  The idea that conceptually we need to get the software that specifies the system right, and then hardware design is just creating a silicon fabric (SoC or FPGA)  which is able to run the software high enough performance  and at low enough power (because otherwise why bother to do anything other than simply execute it). Power, performance and price, the 3Ps again.

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