What an exciting DAC it will be this year. As someone who has been a leading proponent for all things ESL for a while now, and for so many years has been made to look a little silly, well, I do not need to hide my face in shame anymore. ESL is here now and getting stronger very quickly. There will be a lot to see in several important categories:

High-Level Synthesis

In the area of high-level synthesis, the market continues to grow and new capabilities are being added at a frantic pace. Most of the players are betting on C, C++ or SystemC as the starting point and they are:

• Mentor with CatapultC - 1383
• Cadence with C-to-Silicon - 1334
• Forte with Cynthesizer - 750
• AutoESL with AutoPilot - 1577
• Synfora with Pico - 770

Then there are those who want to skip the transaction-level altogether and start from a pure algorithmic description, such as MATLAB/Simulink. An example of this is Synopsys (581) with their Synphony product. And finally there is BlueSpec (1476) who have created a custom language. They strongly believe that this language provides significant benefits over the existing one.

Virtual Platforms

This list would have been long last year, but now it has shrunk considerably. The leaders include:

            Wind River (Intel) with Simics who are not at DAC this year

•    Synopsys (581) with an array of products from Virtio, CoWare, and VaST. It will be interesting to see how well they have started to integrate these together, plus brought in their concepts of hybrid prototyping
•    Mentor with Vista (1383)
•    Carbon (381) allows high level models to be created from RTL models which help take care of legacy issues.

Also take a look at Docea ( 1458) that has power modeling that can bolt on to these virtual prototypes through the use of trace files, and

CoFluent Design (1415) that has system modeling tools, and of course there is

The Mathworks (534), one of the biggest algorithm and system-level modeling companies out there.

Other ESL

• Duolog with Socrates for chip integration and HW/SW integration issues, and
• ChipEstimate (521) (part of Cadence) for chip estimation and planning.

Verification

• Zocalo Tech (1509) – with their assertion creation and control tools and
• NextOp Software (1442) with their assertion synthesis capabilities

In the formal space Jasper (1337) continues to come out with significant enhancements to their products including ActiveDesign.

Sequential equivalence checking is an important part of an ESL flow, and to find that you will have to go and see Calypto (286)

Newbies

One new company that I am eager to see what they have is Vennsa technologies (250) that claims to be able to automate debugging by finding the root cause of errors with no user guidance.

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Brian Bailey – keeping you covered