Embedded software: Next revolution in EDA

Dr. Wally Rhines.

There is a key lesson that Mentor Graphics made while trying to deliver solutions that were right for software and hardware developers. The lesson was: tailor the software to the discipline! Make it as similar to their environment as possible!!

Delivering his speech at the ongoing 13th Global Electronics Summit in Santa Cruz, USA, Dr. Wally Rhines, chairman and CEO, Mentor Graphics, said that 15 years of acquisitions taught Mentor how to think and behave as an embedded software company.

Open systems requires active engagement in software committees. Each open source project has some form of governance to manage contributions, release plans, etc. There is a community peer selection process for each open source project. About 50 Mentor Embedded Sourcerers are actively involved in the open source and Android communities.

There is a need to take the advantage of knowing both worlds. Mentor’s Sourcery CodeBench is an embedded C/C++ development tool based on open-source standards. Sourcery CodeBench is a complete development environment for embedded C/C++ development on ARM, Coldfire, MIPS, Power, X86, and other architectures. You can install, flash and debug in minutes!

Sourcery CodeBench
Sourcery CodeBench is now the semiconductor industry’s leading embedded toolchain. There is an integrated development environment. It has the GNU compiler (GCC) and optimization tools. It allows debugging and analysis, libraries and QEMU simulator.

There are about ~15,000 downloads per month. There have been ~150,000 downloads and 300 releases per year.

Now, there is EDA software piracy!

Great! That’s what was required!! As though software piracy isn’t enough, there is now an article about EDA software piracy!!!

According to the article, the anti-piracy committee of the Electronic Design Automation Consortium (EDAC) estimates that 30-40 percent of all EDA software use is via pirated licenses. That’s a huge number!

What are the chief reasons for EDA software piracy? Surely, it can’t be attributed to the Far East countries alone, and definitely not China and Taiwan, and perhaps, India, for that matter.

Everyone in the semiconductor industry knows that EDA software is required to design. There are hefty license fees involved that companies have to pay.

Designing a chip is a very complex activity and that requires EDA software. EDA firms send out sales guys to all over the country. Why, some of the EDA vendors are also known to form alliances with the technical colleges and universities. They offer their EDA software to such institutes at a very low cost.

Back in 2006, John Tanner wrote an article in Chip Design, stating: EDA tools shouldn’t cost more than the design engineer!

However, how many of such EDA licenses are properly used? Also, has the EDA vendor, who does go out to the technical institutes made a study about any particular institute’s usage of the EDA tool?

The recently held Design and Automation Conference (DAC) showered praises on itself for double-digit rise in attendance.  Was there a mention of EDA piracy in all of that? No way! If so, why not?

The reasons are: the EDA industry already churns out a sizeable revenue from the global usage of EDA software. EDA firms are busy trying to keep up with the latest process nodes and develop the requisite EDA tools. New products are constantly being developed, and so, product R&D is a continuous event! Of course, in all of this race, EDA firms are continuously looking to keep their revenues running high, lest there is an industry climb-down!

Where then, are the reasons for EDA firms to even check, leave alone, control piracy?

An industry friend had this to say regarding EDA software piracy. “It is the inability to use certain ‘tool modules’ only at ‘certain time’. Like, if a IP company wants to just run PrimeTime (Synopsys) few times to ensure its timing worthiness before releasing that IP, and doesn’t need it after that. However, it is is not possible to get such a short time license.” Cost and unethical practices by the stake holders were some other reasons EDA users have cited.

Regarding the status in India, especially, the difference isn’t that much, from say, China. Another user said it is not such a prevelant, ‘worrisome’ aspect, yet. Yet another EDA user said that EDA piracy is there more in the sense of ‘unauthorized’ usage than ‘unpaid’ usage — not using it for what it is supposed to be used for. For instance, using academic licenses for ‘commercial developments’, etc.

That leads to the key question: can EDA software piracy be curtailed to some extent? One user feels that yes, it can. Perhaps, Microsoft type ‘detection’ technologies exist. However, another said that the EDA companies’ expenses have to do, so it can be more than actual losses. Hence, they are probably not quite doing it!

Study on semiconductor design, embedded software and services industry in India

The India Semiconductor Association (ISA) has released a study on semiconductor design, embedded software and services industry, along with Ernst & Young.

According to the report, the key challenges constraining the growth of the semiconductor design industry are summarized under five major issues:
i) Quality, availability and maturity of talent.
ii) Absence of a startup and SME ecosystem.
iii) Lack of a semiconductor ecosystem.
iv) Lack of adequate infrastructure, policies and implementable incentives.
v) External issues such as competition from Asian countries and protectionist policies by some countries.

The report then goes on to tackle each one of these issues in detail under elaborate recommendations.

These recommendations require the concerted and co-ordinated efforts by the government, industry and academia to aid India reach the next level of growth and achieve the specific goals envisaged for the industry. The goals are:

Goal 1: Maintain leadership in semiconductor design by incubating 50 fabless semiconductor companies, each with the potential to grow to $200 million in annual revenues by 2020.

Goal 2: Build on India’s favorable intellectual property protection image and make it among the top 5 destinations for intellectual property creation in the semiconductor design industry.

Goal 3: Capitalize on indigenous demand in strategic sectors to provide impetus to the Indian fabless semiconductor industry.

Goal 4: Sustain and nurture high-class semiconductor design manpower at a growth rate of 20 percent year-on-year to double its current output levels to reach a workforce size of 400,000 in the next five years.

The very first goal itself is a bit far fetched, but not that it can’t be achieved. To reach anywhere close to this goal, a concerted all round effort would be required from all in the industry. The fourth goal would have been better as the first goal, but never mind.

The second goal looks fine, but it is the third goal that seems a bit far off. This is April 2011, and still, there are talks about capitalizing on the indigenous demand in strategic sectors in order to provide impetus to the Indian fabless semiconductor industry?

I recall a discussion in mid-2005 where an industry expert mentioned that fabless was the way forward for the Indian industry! Between then and now, fabs were supposed to come up, but they failed. Nevertheless, one must not give up hope!

Novel software architecture for multi-core SoCs

According to Patrick Maccartee, director of product management and James Ready, CTO, Monta Vista, Monta Vista virtualization can be realized. The benefits to developers are clear in terms of lowered complexity, flexibility in development, high performance, first Linux configured for dataplane performance.

These were the conclusions from the seminar, where  I was an invited audience,  on Beyond Virtualization: The MontaVista Approach to Multi-core SoC Resource Allocation and Control.

Use cases for virtualization in the IT world include server consolidation, underutilization, management of numerous OSs and dependant applications.

Hardware considerations include very uniform server hardware platforms, especially, I/O, and an extensive processor support for virtualization. There also exists a huge uniform market for virtualization, with numerous successful companies of very large scale.

Embedded is different yet again. Embedded devices are already highly optimized, especially, in terms of size, power consumption, CPU utilization, etc. No layer of software makes a processor go faster. So far, it is not a big market.

Multi-core does not automatically mean either RTOS for data plane, hypervisors/virtualization and multiple OSs.  In this scenario, what’s useful for embedded virtualization? The answer is MontaVista virtualization architecture

Context-aware traffic mediation software could help telcos manage data tsunami: Openwave

Given the rising (and no end in sight) surge  in demand for mobile content and data services, mobile network service providers are facing the challenge of effectively managing exponential growth in data traffic. Service providers must also find ways to maximize bandwidth without sacrificing end user experience.

Anand Chandrasekaran, director of Product Management, Openwave.

In conjunction with the Mobile Marketing Association Forum (MMA Forum) APAC event held this April 13-15, I had the opportunity to interact with Anand Chandrasekaran, director of Product Management, Openwave Systems Inc., which also did a global launch of it product — the Analytics Express at the event.

Managing data traffic challenges
Despite claims of vendors to have solved growing data traffic challenges, those still remain. How can Openwave really help manage this?

According to Anand Chandrasekaran, a fundamental shift has occurred in the industry. He said: “The demand for mobile data that we planned for years ago is finally here – only it’s bigger than everyone predicted. The proliferation of new devices like the iPhone and HTC Incredible, along with vastly improved user experiences and unlimited data plans (to date), has caused a tremendous and unprecedented surge in mobile data demand – AT&T disclosed this year that 3 percent of its users consume 40 percent of its bandwidth resources. This increase in traffic and the competitive pressure to keep data plans flat are squeezing service providers’ margins.”

Now let us look at how service providers can tackle the bandwith issue. As per Chandrasekharan, until now, one approach has been to add network capacity through additional equipment CAPEX. Unfortunately, this strategy is expensive and provides only a short-term solution.

Not all service providers have the financial strength to simply throw money at the problem, nor does that guarantee a sustainable solution. Service providers need to take a more holistic approach in developing solutions that will maximize available bandwidth while being able to monetize this surge of mobile data traffic.

An effective way for mobile service providers to handle the approaching data tsunami is to deploy context-aware traffic mediation software that sits in the data path, empowering them with a full view of their network, their subscribers’ profiles and the mobile devices in use. Context-aware traffic mediation enables service providers to monitor, manage and monetize traffic by creating and delivering smart policy-driven services.

According to him, Openwave’s Traffic Mediation solution runs on an open, IP-access platform that acts as a single control point for traffic management and provides services such as content adaptation, web and media optimization, network security, smart policy control and dynamic charging and campaigning.

BSA to help Karnataka PSUs manage software efficiently via SAM

L-R: Keshav S. Dhakad, Chair, India Committee 2010, BSA, Dr. D.S. Ravindran, CEO, Centre of e-Governance, Government of Karnataka, and Lizum Mishra, director, India, BSA.

Ever wondered why you are unable to update your anti-virus software? Chances are that you are running a pirated version of the Windows OS! That itself opens your system and network up to cyber threats and other attacks! Yes, I know! Prices of software, at least the relevant ones, aren’t that low! However, you don’t have much choice, do you?

Now, if you were using original software in your computer, you won’t really face this problem! It means, you are mananging your asset — in this case, the software. To run your heavy, feature rich programs, you need robust software that is sometimes (or, nearly, all the times) expensive!

Okay! Imagine an enterprise using counterfeit or pirated software. Will it face problems? Surely, very serious ones, in the short and long terms. Now what if a public sector undertaking was using pirated software? Perhaps, that would directly impact the services, and in most cases, e-governamce services that it offers.

Keeping all of these in mind, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) has launched a SAM (software asset management) program for public sector undertakings (PSUs) based in the Indian state of Karnataka. This is the first SAM initiative for PSUs in partnership with Centre of e-Governance, Government of Karnataka.

Dr. D.S. Ravindran, CEO, Centre of e-Governance, Government of Karnataka, said: “In the last year, the IT spend by the government was close to Rs. 300 crore. All PSUs are now also coming up with their own IT needs and it is important to adopt this standard of SAM with good IT governance practices in order to enable the state of Karnataka to be more productive and cost-efficient.”

The Centre of e-Governance, Government of Karnataka has two key mandates — putting in place an entire core network infrastructure across the state for e-governance services, and, to expand the capacity and program of running the e-governance initiatives.

Dr. Ravindran added: “We have connected 30,000 offices across the state thru the wide area WAN. We have done over Rs. 22,000 crores worth of procurement over our e-governance platform.”

Round-up 2009: Best of EDA, embedded systems and software, design trends

Friends, the next installment in this series on the round-up of 2009 lists my top posts across three specific fields that are very important within the semiconductor industry — electronic design automation (EDA), embedded systems and software, and some design trends. Here you go!

EDA

Synopsys on Discovery 2009, VCS2009 and CustomSIM

State of global semicon industry: Hanns Windele, Mentor

New routing tool likely to cover upcoming MCMM challenges: Hanns Windele, Mentor

Cadence’s focus — systems, low power, enterprise verification, mixed signal and advanced nodes

Zebu-Server — Enterprise-type emulator from EVE

State of the global EDA industry: Dr. Pradip Dutta, Synopsys

Mentor’s Wally Rhines on global EDA industry and challenges

Mentor’s Wally Rhines on EDA industry — II

Cadence’s Lip-Bu Tan on global semicon, EDA and Indian semicon industry

Indian EDA thought leaders can exploit opportunities from tech disruption!

EMBEDDED SYSTEMS & SOFTWARE

Top 10 embedded companies in India — By the way, this happens to be the most read article of the year!

NI LabView solves embedded and multicore problems!

Intel’s retail POS kiosk provides unique shopping experience

ISA Vision Summit 2009: Growing influence of embedded software on hardware world

MCUs are now shaping the embedded world!

Embedded electronics: Trends and opportunities in India!

Growth drivers for embedded electronics in India

DESIGN TRENDS

Microcontrollers unplugged! How to choose an MCU

Xilinx rolls out ISE Design Suite 11 for targeted design platforms!

TI’s 14-bit ADC unites speed and efficiency

ST/Freescale intro 32-bit MCUs for safety critical applications

Again, I am certain to have missed out some posts that you may have liked. If yes, please do point out. Also, it is not possible for me to select the top 10 articles for the year. If anyone of you can, I’d be very delighted.

My best wishes to you, your families and loved ones for a happy and prosperous 2010.

P.S.: The next two round-ups will be on solar photovoltaics and semiconductors. These will be added tomorrow, before I disappear for the year!

ISA Vision Summit 2009: Growing influence of embedded software on hardware world

This session on day 1 of the recently held ISA Vision Summit had a good mix of speakers. Moderated by Anil Gupta, managing director, ARM India, the speakers included V.R. Venkatesh, Senior Vice President, Product Engineering Services, Wipro Technologies, Kishor Patil, MD & CEO, KPIT Cummins, and Raju Pudota, MD, Denali Software. This is a slightly longer blog post, so bear with me, friends.

The pic here shows Wipro’s Venkatesh making a point, watched by Raju Pudota, Amil Gupta and Kishor Patil.

Kicking off the panel discussion, ARM’s Anil Gupta highlighted the strength of the Indian embedded software industry. As per IDC, embedded software accounts for 81 percent of the projected share of overall revenues in 2008, at $5.98 billion. This will go up to $7.29 billion, while still accounting for 81 percent of the projected share of overall revenues in 2009. The projected share of the overall workforce in this industry segment stands at 82 percent — at 125,663 — which will be maintained during 2009, even as this figure rises to 149,978! Quite impressive!!

Incidentally, a recruiter recently requested information on the workforce numbers in the Indian semiconductor industry. I hope this partly answers your question, friend.

Gupta further added that embedded design had now entered several sectors such as automotive, aerospace and defense, consumer and home products, household appliances, industrial controls, infrastructure and construction, medical electronics, transportation and traffic management, security and telecom. In short, a bright future for this segment ensured, especially in India.

Trends in embedded design include: more demand for features, embedded is driving complexity, and prices have been generally constant/going down. As a result, all of the innovation happening has been giving new experience to the consumers.

Wipro’s V.R. Venkatesh cited the example of medical devices, which are adding functions via embedded software. He presented the case of an efficient infusion pump, which ensures that the five rights of medication safety — right person, right dose, right medicine, right time, and right way — are never violated!

Another example cited was of adding functions in mobile devices. Such mobile devices are making use more dual core chip solutions to run multimedia and MIPS intensive apps on a separate applications processor. They use open operating systems (OS) such as Symbian, Linux, etc., and also have built in sensors, such as motion sensors.

Consequently, usability is now becoming the focus, rather than pure user interface of the mobile. On the impact of software complexity, he said that OSs and middleware are now becoming more complex to enable quicker and easy to develop mobile applications, and also develop complex mobile application with the right API support. He also cited new advances in automotive telematics and navigation. These are implemented through complex software and demanding more hardware features.

Challenges in developing embedded software
However, increasing embedded software has also brought its own challenges. Today, the share of software is ~50 percent of the total cost of development.

Some of the challenges while developing embedded software include multiple regulations; split personality: display (local and remote), compute and communicate; UI; low-power design, application specific accelerators; wireless as de facto connectivity; integrated sensors and geospatiality for enhanced applications; built for untrusted environments (security, virtualization); and integration with service providers and enterprise systems.

Hardware and software in an embedded system are complimentary to each other. Software (middleware and applications) should be used as a ‘Differentiator’ to add more winning features to any new product, he added. There is a need for a platform approach for embedded software development to enable scaling of features and usage across applications. Finally, developers need to keep the cost vs. functions vs. efficiency tradeoff in mind.

Embedded systems landscape trends
KPIT Cummins’ Kishor Patil touched upon the growing need of convergence for hardware and software. According to him, the key driving forces are:
* Low cost and high performance;
* Low power and green;
* Maximum storage and least area/cost;
* Development: Faster TAT (turnaround time);
* Mechanical centric => electronics centric; and
* High value and low cost.

Trends in hardware include silicon shrink at 0.7x, technology challenges at 45nm and below, and business challenges — high volumes for amortizing high mask costs.

Commenting on the embedded systems landscape: market trends and implications, he cited these to be: electronics and applications emerging as distinctive factors; increased electronics in automobiles (~100 MCUs/ECUs per car); silicon shrinkage reaching its limit w.r.t. geometry and costs; and enhancing system performance with the same hardware.

Content growth has been quite notable in automotive electronics. According to Patil, in 2000, an average automobile had 1 million lines of code, 20 ECUs, electronics worth $400, and software constituted 2 percent of the cost of the car. By 2010, an average car will have 100 million lines of code, 50 ECUs, electronics worth $1,100 and software cost at 13 percent of the cost of a car. Of this, 50 percent will be infotainment and 30 percent will be power train.

Impact on stakeholders
So what is the impact on the stakeholders? For OEMs, tier 1s, and semicon companies, it brings new business opportunities, and application specific solutions — common/configurable hardware differentiated by software.

It allows R&D to migrate from proprietary interfaces to open and standard-based interfaces. The impact on software developers includes use of heterogeneous processors, managing parallelism, as well as dealing with scalability, compatibility and re-usability.

Embedded software’s growing importance
Denali’s Raju Pudota focused on current trends, such as growth in UMPC (ultra mobile PCs) designs; multimedia and automotive. For hardware, it means higher integration, multiple embedded processors in one SoC, and multiple microcontrollers (MCUs) with independent functions. Most importantly, embedded software is needed to make all of this work!

He said that more software is required to run all of the IPs integrated on the chip. These can be procured from hardware IP vendors, or developed in-house or contracted to third party providers. Also, different processors require different skills and capabilities. Finally, integration and embedded OS level capabilities. Incidentally, embedded software has become a requirement on the semicon provider. However, third-party IP has been evolving slowly.

Semicon providers’ activities are manifold. These involve developing software for in-house hardware components, sourcing software from hardware IP providers, integrating various software components, and also test software offered to the system integrator.

These growing activities present its own challenges, typically: quality of software provided by hardware IP vendors, high integration time, software verification, and increased investment in software capabilities — and emergence of a new area of core competence.

What can the ecosystem do?
Given this scenario, the ecosystem has a major role to play. These include:

Ease of generation of hardware-aware software — define methods to abstract design to enable auto-generation of device drivers; define methods to auto-generate device drivers; few companies investing in this area.

Define framework/platform to integrate software — similar to on-chip interconnect; leverage mature general software development processes; and customize to specific requirements of embedded area. Finally, make software offerings open-source; leverage large independent developer community.

Ease testing of embedded software
There is also a need to ease the testing of embedded software. Some points to note: Leading semicon providers have home grown software integration and testing platforms; making use of traditional methods — hardware-software co-simulation, simulation acceleration, emulation, and FPGA testing. However, no standard methodology is said to be evolving.

Many industry solutions currently exist for hardware-software integrated testing, such as CoWare, SystemC, Mirabilis, etc. Then, there’s also simulation accelerators (parallel processing), and emulators (FPGA based).

Challenges include: huge investment in model development, high cost of ownership, the ability of third party IP provider to enable integration, and large turnaround time per test. A proper framework for the integration and testing of IPs and embedded software is the need of the hour.

Pudota added that while this is a tough challenge, it would improve time-to-market for complex SOCs, develop a third-party IP ecosystem, and enable the semicon provider to focus on core competencies.

Indian software developers, here’s your chance to win US $25,000!

This piece was information was sent to me by a friend, Ms Tahira Amjad. Thanks a lot!

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Dr. Wally Rhines on global semiconductor industry trends for 2013

It is always a pleasure speaking with Dr. Walden (Wally) C. Rhines, chairman and CEO, Mentor Graphics Corp. I met him on the sidelines of the 13th Global Electronics Summit, held at the Chaminade Resort & Spa, Santa Cruz, USA.

Status of global EDA industry

Dr. Wally Rhines.

First, I asked Dr. Rhines how the EDA industry was doing. Dr. Rhines said: “The global EDA industry has been doing pretty well. The results have been pretty good for 2012. In general, the EDA industry tends to follow the semiconductor R&D by at least 18 months.”

For the record, the electronic design automation (EDA) industry revenue increased 4.6 percent for Q4 2012 to $1,779.1 million, compared to $1,700.1 million in Q4 2011.

Every region, barring Japan, grew in 2012. The Asia Pacific rim grew the fastest – about 12.5 percent. The Americas was the second fastest region in terms of growth at 7.4 percent, and Europe grew at 6.8 percent. However, Japan decreased by 3 percent in 2012.

In 2012, the segments that have grown the fastest within the EDA industry include PCB design and IP, respectively. The front-end CAE (computer aided engineering) group grew faster than the backend CAE. By product category, CAE grew 9.8 percent. The overall growth for license and maintenance was 7 percent. Among the CAE areas, design entry grew 36 percent and emulation 24 percent, respectively.

DFM also grew 28 percent last year. Overall, PCB grew 7.6 percent, while PCB analysis was 25 percent. IP grew 12.6 percent, while the verification IP grew 60 percent. Formal verification and power analysis grew 16 percent each, respectively. “That’s actually a little faster than how semiconductor R&D is growing,” added Dr. Rhines.

Status of global semicon industry
On the fortunes of the global semiconductor industry. Dr. Rhines said: “The global semiconductor industry grew very slowly in 2012. Year 2013 should be better. Revenue was actually consolidated by a lot of consolidations in the wireless industry.”

According to him, smartphones should see further growth. “There are big investments in capacities in the 28nm segment. Folks will likely redesign their products over the next few years,” he said. “A lot of firms are waiting for FinFET to go to 20nm. People who need it for power reduction should benefit.”

“A lot of people are concerned about Japan. We believe that Japan can recover due to the Yen,” he added.