esl and high-level design: who cares? anmol mathur cto and co-founder, calypto design systems
DESCRIPTION
ESL and High-level Design: Who Cares? Anmol Mathur CTO and co-founder, Calypto Design Systems. Trends in Applications and Processor Design. Trends Driven by Consumer Electronics. Time-to-market is king! Ability to re-target designs to new technology nodes - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
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Trends Driven by Consumer Electronics
• Time-to-market is king!– Ability to re-target designs to new technology nodes
– Ability to turn around ASICs in 3 month cycles
• Flexible architectures
– Allow same semiconductor part to live in multiple design generations
• Low power designs– System-level and micro-architectural decisions impact power
very significantly
• Software is the queen!– Key differentiation in consumer products is via applications
– Early software development is key
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Move to System-level Design
System Level Design
Economics• Development Cost• Time to Revenue• Re-spin reduction
Productivity• Design reuse• Platform design• Optimization
Optimization• Performance• Power / battery life• Design updates
Complexity• Increasing design size• HW / SW co-design• Verification testbench
Design tools to leverage system-level models for RTL design and verification are needed
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Usage of System Level Model
System Level Model
Architectural and Performance
Analysis
SLM to RTL Flows
(High Level Synthesis)
Functional reference model
Faster Simulation
Platform for software
development
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Manual Process Manual Process
Imp.
SLMSLM
RTLRTL
Manual ProcessManual Process
Alg
ori
thm
icM
icro
-arc
hit
ectu
re
User Control
Limited Control Broad Control
Broad Control
Pro
cess F
low
SLM to RTL Gap
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Power Dilemma
• Greater power savings opportunities at higher levels of abstraction
• Greater accuracy of power analysis requires detailed layout information
Accu
rate
Sw
itchin
g A
ctivity
Acc
ura
te C
ap
aci
tan
ce
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Status of High-level Modeling Today• Majority of design teams still using raw C/C++
– Proprietary modeling of simulation time
– Simulation speed and ease of coding are key criteria
• System-model and RTL partitioning is not consistent– Hard to use system-models for RTL verification
• System-level modeling and RTL teams do not talk!
• Several different system models at differing levels of abstraction often exist– Different level of interface/timing accuracy
– Different levels of computational accuracy
• Diverse/non-standard modeling makes the space very fragmented – Very hard to build tools for verification/synthesis
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SLM to RTL FlowsManual SLM to RTL DESIGN FLOW SLM TO RTL HLS DESIGN FLOW
Floating PointModel
Fixed PointModel
Micro-architectureDefinition
RTLDesign
RTL Area/TimingOptimization
RTLSynthesis
Place & Route
HardwareASIC/FPGA
HardwareASIC/FPGA
Place & Route
RTLSynthesis
Fixed PointC++ Model
Floating PointModel
High LevelSynthesis
Constraints
ManualMethods
Logic Analyzer
+
+Logic
Analyzer
System Level Model
Precision RTLor DC
ASIC or FPGAVendor
Algorithm Functional Description
Algorithm Functional Description
Sys
tem
Des
ign
erH
ard
war
e D
esig
ner
Ven
do
r
Replaces manual RTL creation with automation
Connects system domain to hardware design
Technology based design space exploration.
Up to 20x reduction in RTL creation
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RTL to layout
System System AnalysisAnalysis
Algorithm
GDS2GDS2C/C++
SystemC
C/C++SystemC
Design model
TargetTarget
ASIC
SLM to RTL Flow
High Level
Synthesis
Technology files(Standard Cells + RAM cuts)
RTLRTL
Formal Proof
(SEC)
FPGAsynthesis
FPGANetlist
FPGANetlist
FPGA
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Making ESL/HLM a Reality
• Standardized levels of abstraction in system-level models– SystemC 2.0 starting to do that
• Consistency between system-level models and RTL– Coherent system-level and RTL design teams
• Tool eco-system to link system-level and RTL– System-level model validation
– Hardware-software co-simulation
– High-level synthesis
– Sequential equivalence checking
– Sequential/micro-architectural power optimizations at RTL and
micro-architectural levels