Startups say ESL adoption accelerating

 
SAN FRANCISCO — The adoption of electronic system level (ESL) design methodology is accelerating, according to a pair of Waltham, Mass.-based startups, Bluespec Inc. and Carbon Design Systems Inc., each of which touted business expansion this week.

According to Shiv Tasker, Bluespec CEO, designers are beginning to use ESL for more complex circuits, such as main system interconnects, direct memory access controllers, processor cores and physical layers of peripherals.

Tasker said Bluespec, which provides technology that synthesizes SystemVerilog design and verification assertions into Verilog 1995 RTL, is seeing a lot of interest from companies working on chips for the H.264 video compression standard. Because H.264 offers three different profiles, Tasker said, designers are grappling with a lot of implementation choices.