Posted by Tom De Schutter on December 18, 2014
Growing up in Belgium, it never occurred to me that rain or for that matter water can be in short supply. Living in California for over 8 years now, I know better. While I still enjoy the fantastic weather in the Bay Area, I do realize the importance of having enough rain and water. Water is one of those resources that we easily take for granted. It is in fact the most important resource, but we are just used to the fact that it flows out of a tap, hose or shower with the turn of a valve. According to recent studies, the last three years of drought were the most severe that California experienced in at least 1,200 years.
In the meantime November and December have turned out to be quite wet. While it is great to fill up the basins again, too much rain in a short time brings its own set up problems, like mud slides and trees falling down. On the other hand, it is clear that Californians aren’t really used to rain and call just about anything the storm of the century, as depicted nicely in following picture:
This cycle of extreme drought, followed by heavy rain reminds me of the problem software developers are facing. Without a strategy to incrementally get access to targets for software developers, the software development cycle for a particular project looks first like a drought: nothing is available to start software bring-up and then all of a sudden hardware is becoming available all at once and the pressure is on to deal with the software requirements of all IP blocks and subsystems at the same time.
A more incremental software target development plan can mitigate this problem and alleviate the pressure on the software team, resulting in a better flow between hardware and software and a better product overall, which is available in the market faster.
It is hard to achieve this flow using purely hardware based targets for software development. Inherently virtual prototypes can be available much earlier since there is no dependence on hardware. Plus the nature of having a model-based approach allows you to stage the incremental target availability any which way you want. That means that the software team can drive the stages based on the logical order of software bring-up, debug and test.
So whenever you find yourself in need of an earlier software target to mitigate the trend of software development droughts and floods for your project, you might want to turn on the virtual prototyping hose to ease the software development flow.
Patrick Sheridan
Patrick Sheridan is responsible for Synopsys' system-level solution for virtual prototyping. In addition to his responsibilities at Synopsys, from 2005 through 2011 he served as the Executive Director of the Open SystemC Initiative (now part of the Accellera Systems Initiative). Mr. Sheridan has 30 years of experience in the marketing and business development of high technology hardware and software products for Silicon Valley companies.
Malte Doerper
Malte Doerper is responsible for driving the software oriented virtual prototyping business at Synopsys. Today he is based in Mountain View, California. Malte also spent over 7 years in Tokyo, Japan, where he led the customer facing program management practice for the Synopsys system-level products. Malte has over 12 years’ experiences in all aspects of system-level design ranging from research, engineering, product management and business development. Malte joined Synopsys through the CoWare acquisition, before CoWare he worked as researcher at the Institute for Integrated Signal Processing Systems at the Aachen University of Technology, Germany.
Tom De Schutter
Tom De Schutter is responsible for driving the physical prototyping business at Synopsys. He joined Synopsys through the acquisition of CoWare where he was the product marketing manager for transaction-level models. Tom has over 10 years of experience in system-level design through different marketing and engineering roles. Before joining the marketing team he led the transaction-level modeling team at CoWare.