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Electronic News, Dec 18, 2000 by Joerg Henkel, Xiaobo Hu

As the program co-chairs of the 9th International Symposium on Hardware/Software Codesign (CODES 2001), we would like to give our view of trends in system-level design and hardware/software codesign that are the focus of the conference.

The CODES Symposium is the major event for the presentation and exchange of approaches and ideas in the areas of system-level design and codesign of embedded systems. Starting in the early 1990s (Colorado, fail 1992) as the Codesign Workshop, CODES has continuously focused on both existing and emerging challenges in these areas.

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Back in 1992, mobile computing systems, PDAs, wireless communication devices such as cell phones started to gain a significant market share. At the same time, automotive control devices went mainstream resulting in today's car market where even entry-level cars have dozens of microprocessors. On the EDA front, we saw higher-level synthesis paradigms like register transfer level (RTL) synthesis becoming mature. Last but not least, high-computing capacity and computing power came to a point where systems could be simulated, synthesized and optimized as a whole. This was the birth date of CODES.

From the beginning, CODES focused on capturing the whole design process of an embedded system, starting with the specification and constraint formulation, early stage analysis and simulation through combined hardware/software synthesis, optimization, simulation and eventually test. Naturally, rapid prototyping and reconfigurable computing have also always been a main part of CODES.

The unique mixture of various disciplines and application areas has made CODES a place where hardware and software researchers, developers, application engineers, technical managers, vendors and otherwise interested attendees meet. As always, this year's theme is at the edge of the newest trends in the system-level and codesign domain. The areas of interest include computer-aided codesign techniques, software for codesign, codesign architectures, system development processes, verification and test of hardware/software systems, and applications.

Though the emerging trends in the early 1990s were quite challenging, the upcoming decade will bring even more demands due to a connected world where the traditional PC is replaced by mobile computing/communication/Internet devices that are so complex and extensive to build that a new generation of EDA paradigms is indispensable for leading the respective devices mainstream, i.e., making them reasonably priced at a greatly enhanced functionality.

Trends in System Design

We are currently entering an era that is widely cited as the so-called Post-PC Era. Since the market penetration of PCs in private and commercial households has reached levels that suggest a slowdown of the formerly exponential growth, the traditional PC has become a commodity. The question is whether this is good news?

We would like to answer "yes" since Post-PC not only signals the end of an era but also opens the doors to a new era that might change people's lives even more than the PC did for several reasons. First of all, the PC has enabled the Internet revolution, with all of its side effects. The majority of the Internet's ripple effects have improved everyday life in many respects: It is the information that can be retrieved in seconds, the cheapest item that can be found and compared in seconds and ordered for next-day delivery, it is the fast communication that enables collaboration in groups that are virtually spread all over the globe. The building of this infrastructure is still in its infancy and no end of this rapid growth and the application possibilities enabled by the Internet is currently insight. Also rapidly changing is the access to the Internet: rather than from the more or less locally fixed access via a PC, Internet access is and will be accomplished increasingly by mobile computation/communication/ Internet devices.

From a design point of view, the new types of devices are much harder to design than at traditional PC since they have to be lightweight, low-power consuming and small in dimensions. Adding to these challenges, the need for computation power is increasing drastically since the traditional user-interface, consisting of keyboard, mouse and touch-screen, will be replaced by more intuitive interfaces such as voice recognition and vision recognition interfaces.

Besides these user-driven devices there is also a rapidly growing market of nonuser-driven devices like the oft-cited Internet-connected refrigerator that orders goods when they're close to being used-up without explicit human interaction. Other examples are the intelligent house that switches on the heating system controlled via the users' communication/Internet device some time before arrival and security systems with Internet access in the automotive domain. The list of examples could be extended almost endlessly.

We can summarize that future computation/communication/Internet devices are becoming more complex and at the same time demands for security, reliability, power consumption, weight and volume are drastically increasing. How can these trends be satisfied by current and future state-of-the-art in silicon technology and design methodology?

Manufacturing Industry

2001 Ad

Electronic News, Dec 18, 2000 by Joerg Henkel, Xiaobo Hu

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