Subject: ITC - Philips POV
From: m.vitale@philips.com
Date: Sun Feb 24 2002 - 05:40:07 PST
Philips Semiconductors has put considerable effort in reducing the
time and cost to market company-wide, for both SoCs and IP blocks.
As part of this strategy we feel that a co-ordinated approach to
prototyping is critical.
Individual component of this prototyping strategy are readily
available and are put to good use in our design flows. Emulators,
custom RSP systems (Velocity and NAPA for Philips), software
simulators, verification frameworks and languages will continue to
serve well our business lines for the upcoming couple of years.
In order to significally advance the state of the art and provide our
development groups with the tools they will need a few years from now,
we also known that increased interoperability between tools and
prototyping
systems is required.
We saw great opportunities in the SCE-MI interface and joined the
corresponding working group. We're now very exited about continuing
this work under the Accellera umbrella. The widened scope of the
Interface TC goes a long way towards the vision Philips has for
prototyping but at the same time poses significant challenges in terms
of organizing the work over a considerable span of time. Philips position
has been presented in more detail in some presentations I've delivered
to this group, so I won't bore you here.
It is critical, in my opinion, that we reach soon a group agreement as
to what we want to accomplish and how to schedule the work over the
upcoming months. Having meaningful intermediate deliverables will keep
the group focused while providing EDA vendors with something to
implement as we go.
I think that finalizing the Modeling Interface will be a useful first
step. For Philips this will require some further reviewing rounds from
groups that weren't initially involves in order to check compatibility
with execution engines different from conventional emulators and
proposing changes were we to find problems with the present
specification.
A second step I think we've to take rather soon is get the ball
rolling on the Control Interface. During one of the last pre-Accellera
meetings, it was suggested that customers should have worked on a
requirement document and this might be a reasonable way for getting
started. We can also decide to have a formal subgroup devoted to this
issue.
A debugging interface is also important, but in my view comes after
the points I've just mentioned. If the rest of the group have stronger
feelings on this, I'm not against starting some work on this.
It is also critical that each participant makes a reasonable effort to
disseminate the work done under Accellera inside their own
organization. I'll certainly try to do it for Philips.
From my side, I can devote about 1/2 day/week for working on the normal
operation
of the working group. More time can be discussed for specific
deliverables.
I'll also try to get more people in Philips directly involved in this effort (in particular,
we have groups which would be potentially interested on different aspects
of debugging and might consider participating)
Maurizio Vitale
Philips Semiconductors
System and Software Design - Innovation Team
1721 Moon Lake Blvd. - suite 500 ph: +1 (847) 843-4562
Hoffman Estates, IL 60194
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