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Moore's Law Threatened by Multi-Core Programmability Challenge

By Ann Steffora Mutschler -- Electronic News, 7/24/2006 7:00:00 AM

SAN FRANCISCO – During the annual Sunday, pre-DAC EDAC-Gartner forecast panel, Gartner Dataquest’s Gary Smith, managing VP of design and engineering research at the market research firm said programmability of multi-core systems is the number one issue that the EDA industry needs to solve.

First, Smith gave the industry kudos for holding the cost of designing an IC to between $10 million and $20 million since 1997, and keeping verification costs flat for the last seven years.

“This industry has been doing an outstanding job holding down the cost of design and I think you should all pat yourselves on the back for that,” Smith told the audience comprised mainly of those from the EDA industry vendors.

However, he noted, “the cost of design is going up because of the cost of embedded software. The software teams are getting gigantic, the productivity of embedded design [is lacking], and they haven’t done anything to address productivity, and the ITRS is starting to turn its attention to the software problem.

“Programmability has now replaced power as the number one impediment to the continuation of Moore’s law,” he said.

“When we do a design, it’s not an IC, it’s not a PC board – it’s a system that goes out and is sold. We can do as good a job as we can and we have been doing a great job keeping the design costs down for the silicon design, and we’re not doing that bad with the PCB design either, but the cost of software is killing us right now, and we’ve got to do something about that,” he continued.

Smith also noted that there are key areas for growth particularly given that 38 percent of designers report using EDA tools that are developed in-house; up from the 27 percent figure he gave at last year’s pre-DAC forecast. Analog, RF and systems design tools are in particular need of attention, he said.

Finally, Smith addressed the “EDA killer app” topic.

“Until this year, the killer apps weren’t easy to find. We were trying to look at them from purely a hardware/IC design perspective. What I’ve been looking for is what spreads across most of the market; what is everybody going to have to take a look at,” he explained.

“We have to figure out how to design software concurrently to use in a multi-core environment. The horror stories of some platform-based designs, the problems with the cell processor, all point to one thing: we’ve got to solve the concurrency problem,” Smith urged.

“The EDA industry is in the best position to solve this concurrency problem because they understand concurrency,” he added.

“The most used killer app will be the architectural workbench, and Mathworks has proven that point, and it will be used for virtually all ES level design, the user of which is an electrical engineer who doesn’t care what he uses to make the chip—they’ll use whatever they need to since they don’t have a hardware or software bias,” he concluded.