Carbon Design Systems

My last chip design at Intel was a GPU called the 82786 and the architects of the chip wrote a virtual prototype using the MAINSAIL language. By using a virtual prototype they were able to:

• Simulate bus traffic, video display and video RAM
• Determine throughput
• Measure latency
• Verify that bus priorities were working
• Optimize the bus interconnect

...

Power is a fundamentally hard problem. When you have finished the design, you have accurate power numbers but can't do anything about them. At the RTL level you have some power information but it is often too late to make major architectural changes (add an offload audio-processor, for example). Early in the design, making changes is easy but you often lack accurate data to ...

SoC designers have always wanted to simulate hardware and software together during new product development, so one practical question has been how to trade off performance versus accuracy when creating an early model of the hardware. The creative minds at Carbon Design Systems and ARM have combined to offer us some hope and relief in building virtual platforms that are both fast and accurate enough. Some 4,000 attendees were at the ARM TechCon last fall when Bill Neifert of Carbon Design Systems and Rob Kaye of ARM presented: High Performance or Cycle Accuracy? ...

Next week December 10-12th is the Microprocessor Test and Verification (MTV 2012) which is in Austin Texas (as DAC will be next year, of course). After lunch on Monday there is a panel session on the effectiveness of virtual prototyping entitled When simulation suffices, who needs FPGA or emulation? Bill ...

As George E.P. Box said, "essentially all models are wrong but some are useful." That is certainly the case with Carbon's models. For processors they have two models, one that is fast (but not timing-accurate) and one that is accurate (but not fast). But both are useful.

Carbon attended the ARM TechCon in Santa Clara a couple of weeks ago, as I did myself. ...

I've talked before about how venture capitalists will no longer invest in EDA companies since the prospect for a huge return just isn't there any more. By big return I mean an acquisition at hundreds of millions of dollars, like SPC, CCR, Ambit, Cadmos, Simplex. But we all know that chips cannot be designed without software ...

When I worked for virtual platform companies, one of the things that I used to tell prospective customers was that virtual prototypes were not some second-rate approach to software ...

There is an interesting Gizmodo review of an HTC Android-based smartphone. The basically positive review (as good as the iPhone, best Android phone at the time) ends up with an update: ...

Just up the road from Cambridge-based ARM in Kings Langley is Imagination Technologies, their biggest competitor in the GPU market. Interestingly they also were a customer of VLSI Technology in the early days back when they were called Videologic. Tomorrow, jointly with Carbon, they are announcing that a wide range of their PowerVR, Ensigma and Meta core IP ...