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Innovation – Design Focus Redefined
December 31, 1969 |Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
By Rob Evans, Altium Limited
The introduction of a new device can turn the industry on its head. That device technology shift has arrived in the form of programmable devices such as high-capacity FPGAs.
Electronics design by nature is under a state of constant evolution, driven by a complex mix of changing business needs and advances in electronics technology. While analysis of that heady mix of influences is an extensive topic, it can be a simple shift in semiconductor device technology that triggers an explosive effect through the industry. In this case, evolution becomes revolution.
Such a development in device technology only comes along once in a while and invariably is matched by a period where the electronics industry wakes up, begins exploiting the possibilities that the device offers, and finally takes a fresh look at the processes and tools needed for electronics design. The introduction of microprocessors is a fitting case in point, where, although initially developed for pocket calculators, their broader potential quickly triggered the software revolution.
The important point here is that the introduction of a seemingly interesting new device turned the industry on its head. Products changed, the design process was redefined, and a whole new design discipline was created. In this case, it created the embedded software specialist.
Perhaps the most profound impact of this change was how the uniqueness of an electronic product could be defined by software as well as hardware. Software offers the ability to inject comparatively sophisticated functional characteristics – a level of intelligence – into a product so that it offers an advantage over competitors. In addition, “soft” intellectual property (IP) is more difficult to reverse engineer than physical hardware, so that market advantage becomes more sustainable.
The less obvious shift in the design landscape was that the hardware design itself began to contribute less to the uniqueness of a given product. While still vitally important to that product’s success, what electronic parts are used and how they are connected together was no longer the dominant force in defining the functional characteristics of a design. Software increasingly was taking that role.
Bigger, but Softer
Turning to today, that once-in-a-while device technology shift has arrived in the form of programmable devices such as high-capacity FPGAs. As before, the apparent simplicity of the concept belies its impact. At a basic level, these devices provide a virtual blank canvas of digital logic, but the significance of those capabilities has resonated through the electronics design world, and ultimately into the products that are delivered to market.
FPGAs allow designers to move large sections of a design’s digital logic into the soft realm, but the real impact is realized when higher-level function blocks – processors, memory, peripheral logic – are introduced into that space. If you thought the impact of microprocessors was big, consider the significance of being able to implement an entire digital design, including processors and embedded software, within a single low-cost reprogrammable device. All that’s needed beyond the pins of the FPGA is the hardware interfaces that connect to and communicate with the outside world, such as switches, keypads, displays, power modules, ports, and so on.
Figure 1. Hardware designs can be simplified based on the soft design structure.
Equally profound is the secondary effect: where the unique, competitive aspects of a product design can be defined in both software and embedded hardware. This represents a blurring of the boundary between software and hardware, a further shift towards a soft approach to electronics design, and a corresponding reduction in the importance of physical hardware design from a product differentiation perspective.
While development of a product’s physical hardware still is vitally important, it has become part of the design process that adds little sustainable differentiation to the final result. Where the value of design now lies, and where the prime focus of design effort should be, is in the soft elements that define its competitive advantage. Today, this is a product’s true IP, its device intelligence: the soft elements of a design.
Breaking Hardware Dominance
Traditionally, the ability to create the software part of a design is predicated on the availability of a physical hardware platform on which it’s developed. In conventional design flows, meaningful software development can’t proceed until a hardware prototype is available, so a number of key device hardware decisions must be made first, then a suitable platform is designed and created.
The problem with this outdated approach to soft-centric design is that the suitability of that hardware is far from guaranteed, because the soft elements it must support are yet to be developed. As that software development progresses, the required capabilities of the hardware platform will become clearer, yet its configuration already has been locked in with the initial prototype.
Development of software and embedded hardware should be at the beginning and the center of today’s designs. When it becomes obvious that the design would benefit from – or may only be achievable with – a different type of processor or FPGA, etc., the choice is to create a new, revised hardware platform or accept a compromise. In particular, flows based on embedded design tools from FPGA vendors compound the problem by forcing a sequential design flow and locking developers into a limited range of programmable devices. Core design functionality is constrained by the predetermined hardware platform, and revising that platform will introduce a significant cost and time penalty.
The approach in general is one of using a collection of separate and isolated design tools. Each completed task must be handed over to the next then reinterpreted in that domain, and the choice of physical hardware devices is limited by the partisan nature of the vendor tools. What’s needed is a vendor-independent design system that also raises the abstraction of the design processes to a point where the design IP is not tied to particular physical hardware. Such a system would allow designers to focus first and foremost on creating a product’s core design intelligence.
Independent Soft Design
The first requirement for a product development system that releases designers to focus on a product’s key functionality is one that is independent of FPGA vendor or device. Unlike conventional integrated development environment (IDE) toolsets from device vendors, a neutral embedded development system allows designers to both choose and change the programmable device to suit the software under development, rather than the other way around.
There are a number of prerequisites to achieving this capability successfully. The system needs full knowledge of the physical and architectural attributes of all supported devices. This could be provided by library and driver files feeding in device-specific data such as programming information, pin-out capabilities and boundary scan data, plus physical and graphical models for the device. If this arrangement is supported by a hardware development platform that features changeable FPGA device boards, the potential exists for the entire design system to align to the current programmable device choice.
To unlock the embedded design itself from the current FPGA device, the design-to-device targeting information – timing requirements, place-and-route data, and port-to-pin mapping – must be stored separately from the design source files. With this arrangement, retargeting the design to a different FPGA no longer means that the design requires significant re-engineering to suit the new device, since only the separate design-to-target data file needs updating.
A design system that truly is independent of FPGA vendor and provides multi-device compatibility must extend also to the embedded IP cores. This is resolved with library collections of IP function blocks and components that are pre-synthesized and verified to suit the architecture of all supported devices. Embedded designs then can be developed from ready-to-go blocks of circuitry without concern for the underlying device architecture. Along with core blocks of functional logic, this soft IP would include microprocessors, peripherals, and memory, so everything needed is ready to go, regardless of the hardware platform.
An electronic product development system needs practical design abstraction layers that deal with the underlying hardware complexity. For example, systems such as the Wishbone standard can be implemented to normalize interfaces between processors, memory, and peripherals. This, plus library-based interface cores that wrap around existing processors (embedded or discrete) and peripherals, provides isolating layers that allow the system rather than the designer to handle low-level hardware interface complexity.
When these types of intelligent layer or hardware abstraction systems are backed by software compiler toolchains for all supported processors, a design’s soft IP is no longer intimately bound to the physical and embedded hardware. This reduces design complexity and allows hardware decisions to be made much later in the design cycle. It frees designers to focus first and foremost on the soft elements that define a product’s unique functionality.
Focus on Innovation
With the underlying architecture complexity handled by systems that separate the soft design intelligence from physical hardware, the groundwork exists for implementing systems that simplify the design interface itself. These can raise the level of abstraction of the embedded design process by supplementing a hardware description language (HDL) editor with simplified design capture systems. These might be a graphical flow diagram, or even a schematic capture system where functional blocks of IP can be moved around and interconnected in a familiar way. Designers concentrate on capturing key product functionality without being restricted by the hardware platform. This can be dealt with later, when the product’s form and function are mature.
Figure 2. The flexibility of programmable devices allows designers to create a complete hardware system that connects to the user via its outputs.
Separating design functionality from physical hardware also offers a high level of design portability where multiple hardware configurations are easy to explore. The core IP of the design can be implemented on different hardware platforms that might deliver benefits such as improved performance, simpler implementation, or lower costs. Hardware platforms might include a custom board design, off-the-shelf hardware, or even a product that has already been deployed and is in the field.
Conclusion
Both now and in the future, these types of systems are needed to harness the full potential of the soft design revolution triggered by the availability of low-cost, high-capacity programmable devices such as FPGAs. It is crucial to recognize and respond to how the current design landscape has changed, and how traditional design flows and toolsets must be redefined to cope with key design disciplines merging. By bringing these domains together in a unified design system that uses a single model of the design data, high-level abstracted processes can permeate though the entire design system.
The general move from hardware- to soft-centric design started with the birth of the microprocessor and has moved to a new level with growing adoption of large-scale programmable devices such as FPGAs. It is ultimately the soft functionality implemented in a design that delivers sustainable product differentiation, not the nature of the physical hardware where it resides. Design systems for the industry must release that IP from the restrictions imposed by a predetermined and inflexible hardware platform, allowing designers to refocus on innovation and the core functional intelligence defining tomorrow’s successful electronic products.
Rob Evans is a technical editor with Altium Limited. He has more than 20 years of experience in electronics design and studied electronic engineering at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia. Contact him at rob.evans@altium.com.au.