Chipset design
As technology development begins to outpace manufacturing capability and price points continue to drop, semiconductor manufacturers are searching for new strategies to meet these increasing demands. Shrikrishna Gokhale, Head of Sasken’s Semiconductor Division, explains.
As demand for high feature and low form factor electronic products continues to spiral, traditional product development methods are not keeping pace with market demand. As a result device manufacturers are starting to implement new strategies for speedier product development to gain time-to-market advantages through concurrency in hardware and software design phases of their product development cycles.
The complex interplay of these requirements, such as memory footprint, real-time processing capability, interoperability, high product reliability and time-to-market, along with design parameters, is bringing together device manufacturers and semiconductor companies as partners in product design.
The prerogative of hardware/software co-design has, therefore, moved from device manufacturers to the drawing boards of semiconductor manufacturers. The game is no longer dictated by silicon alone but by what sits on top of it.
As a result, the R&D centres of semiconductor manufacturers, were until recently focused primarily on hardware design issues associated with shrinking junction geometries, higher processing speeds, gate densities, low-power performance and high production yields. However, semiconductor manufacturers are now looking beyond hardware design by gearing up to include more software development staff in their design centers. The traditional stronghold of key hardware design engineers is being complemented with an equally competent pool of software technocrats who build layers of embedded software to create an attractive differentiator for the semiconductor product.
The need for such co-development of hardware and software is creating a paradigm shift in the product development strategies of Semiconductor companies. For one, they need to have thorough knowledge of the target application, associated domain know-how and standardisation/IP licensing strategies for the related technology. Secondly, they have to learn and acquire the latest skills in software engineering, which historically has never been their core strength.
The methodologies and tools for software development happen to be significantly different from those of hardware design engineering. In addition, the ease with which software designs can be modified, shared and integrated by geographically dispersed teams of designers throws up the additional challenge of intellectual property protection and configuration management. But perhaps the most difficult challenge is to implement concurrent processes of hardware and software development, involving huge interdependency in design while keeping the overall design cycle time within acceptable limits.
Semiconductor companies are rapidly realising the need for creating an eco-system of partners to handle such challenges effectively, as opposed to handling them fully through in-house capabilities. The companies which are implementing such practices are setting the pace of product development and leading the competition, demonstrating that embedded software is the key value proposition. For embedded products, it is widely believed that hardware will become more of a commodity, with software being the key differentiator stimulating the need for co-development.
Co-development of embedded software involves various stages of software simulation, debugging, constraint estimation and emulation – with performance estimation and assessment being done at every stage. Since this process runs in parallel with the hardware or chip development process, it often throws up challenges in the form of real-time performance constraints. In turn this may necessitate changes in the hardware/software partitioning and require the inclusion of additional HW blocks, known as accelerators in the hardware design. The co-development of software also requires a whole set of new design automation tools for system-level design, system simulation workbenches, emulators and test tools.
The rising demand for the creation of an eco-system is also giving rise to a whole new set of design service companies that are putting together integrated capabilities for domain-specific software development, reusable components, system integration, testing & validation, standards compliance testing, interoperability testing and customization services. New business models of risk and reward sharing, which so far were confined only to IP-licensing business, are creeping into eco-system partnership engagements.
As technological advances allow for the development of highly-integrated, programmable ICs – which are flexible and can perform a wide range of functions – software has today become as important if not more important, than hardware in systems. Steadily but surely, collaborative value creation as a means of creating a bigger market together is emerging as the new mantra within the semiconductor industry.