Synopsys Catalyst attempts to draw friends, rivals into a common ESL platform

The focus among the big three in the EDA world seems to have shifted a bit of late: from developing new point tools to integrating existing tools into interoperable platforms. Nowhere is this more necessary than at the electronic systems level, where design teams’ skepticism about the whole concept tends to be met with a blizzard of unrelated point tools with differing metaphors, user interfaces, and data formats. It’s enough to keep a design manager skeptical.

"The real world today," said Synopsys product director Frank Schirrmeister, "is that a systems-level designer has to work with models from different vendors, different simulation platforms, different software debuggers, drivers from different sources, different vendors of transaction-level models, and different sources of protocol stacks. You can end up dealing with five or ten EDA vendors, two or three software debuggers, and five driver developers just to get one system-level design up and simulating."

The traditional industry approach to this problem would have been to simply pick the best-of-breed vendors in each area and acquire them. But these are not traditional times—they are thrifty times. And as the notion of ESL design spreads out to include not just intent-capture and behavioral simulation, but also package design, software development, hardware/software optimization, and even reference-design creation, many categories of tools are populated already with a number of entrenched players, making it unlikely that any one tool could dominate even with the backing of a Cadence or a Synopsys.

 So on to Plan B, as they say. Today Synopsys introduced a program called System-Level Catalyst—something more than a friendly working relationship but less than a joint venture—that brings together about two dozen companies to create an ecosystem for systems-level design. Some of the vendors, such as Altera and Xilinx, Jeda and Jungo, are in complementary lines of business to Synopsys. Others such as CoWare and Forte, are arguably direct competitors. Altogether, the collection covers ten component pieces of the ESL puzzle: architectural models; functional models; system modeling tools; simulation tools; debugging tools; hardware implementation tools; stacks, operating software and middleware; general software; and design services.

The concept, according to Schirrmeister, is to ensure interoperability between key tools from all these vendors and with Synopsys’s core ESL tool platforms for model development, software development, and debug. Initially, at least, this means data interoperability: getting the tools to successfully exchange data with each other through their existing interfaces. This will be done as much as possible by using standard inter-tool data formats, such as Accellera’s SCE-MI or SPIRIT’s IP-XACT, but it may also involve tweaking proprietary formats or developing scripts and translators in the long run.

Synopsys has set up a free license exchange program among members, so that vendors within the SL Catalyst program can verify interoperability of each other’s tools. This program would give a member access to a selection of such Synopsys tools as Innovator, DesignWare System-Level Library, System Studio, Synplify DSP, and the ConfirmaTMplatform.

Synopsys has opened membership to three broad categories of vendors: IP and EDA vendors, embedded software vendors, and training and design-services vendors, as well as to some software developers who have done work in support of Synopsys DesignWare cores. In addition to access to licenses Synopsys feels are appropriate to the member’s tasks, membership offers cross-promotion on Synopsys’s Web site and other vehicles, and a lead-sharing arrangement.

If it all works as planned, users should be able to assemble transaction-level models of systems, explore them, and evolve them into hardware implementations using a variety of IP sources, all without running aground on a shoal of incompatibilities. It’s a tall order, but definitely worth the trouble.