Sonics goes to freeware to encourage interconnect modeling
Free modeling software captures, evaluates AMBA-compatible bus designs.
By Ron Wilson, Executive Editor -- EDN, December 2, 2009
Signaling the growing momentum of freeware in the EDA space, SoC interconnect synthesis vendor Sonics announced this week a set of downloadable free tools for AMBA-compliant bus interconnect in SoC designs. The tools, a subset of the Sonics SNAP (Sonics Network for AMBA Protocol) environment announced earlier this year, will allow designers to capture and evaluate an AMBA-compliant bus interconnect structure without having to purchase an evaluation license from Sonics.
The free offer includes the SNAP design capture tool, which uses an intuitive graphics interface to eliminate complex text-based bus specifications. In addition, the freeware includes early estimation tools for performance, gate-count, and power. So with the free tools an SoC designer can explore a range of interconnect options and settle on a best approach. The free capture and evaluation tools do not have locks that would limit the size or complexity of the design, but they are intended specifically for AMBA-protocol implementations, not proprietary bus protocols.
The code generation tool that actually creates an interconnect implementation is not included in the free package. So once a team settles on an implementation, they would need to license the full SNAP package from Sonics in order to complete the design with Sonics interconnect technology. In principle, said Sonics director of business development Frank Ferro, a team could use the free tools to evaluate alternative AMBA architectures, and then implement the bus with ARM or in-house IP. But he warned that Sonics IP includes some concurrency and quality-of-service features that would not be trivial to implement in standard ARM IP, so the power and performance estimates from the free tools might come in better than an actual non-Sonics implementation. Gate count would also differ, except by coincidence.
Ferro said that these issues notwithstanding, the free package does have some value as an exploration tool. But he said that Sonics was not interested in extracting that value through license fees. "We are an IP company, not an EDA company," Ferro said. "We are trying to streamline the process for design teams who are evaluating and implementing bus architectures."
Joining an existing body of freeware and open-source code that has grown and evolved along with the EDA industry, and increasingly complex and often-gratis offerings from FPGA vendors, the free SNAP front-end fits into a pattern in chip design tools. With SoC design teams forced to minimize costs and often pursuing designs only as far as proof of concept or RTL sign-off before putting them on the shelf, there is strong interest in minimal-cost or license-free tools for these front-end tasks. Until end-user demand for products that consume SoCs gets strong enough for revenue to start flowing back up to fabless semiconductor companies, this trend is likely to intensify.
