Searching For A System Abstraction
By Brian Bailey, Semiconductor Engineering
Without abstraction, advances in semiconductor design would have stalled decades ago and circuits would remain about the same size as analog blocks. No new abstractions have emerged since the 1990s that have found widespread adoption. The slack was taken up by IP and reuse, but IP blocks are becoming larger and more complex. Verification by isolation is no longer a viable strategy at the system level. Without abstraction, system-level verification becomes an increasingly daunting task.
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“The higher the abstraction level, the more important the ecosystem becomes to enable interoperability between vendors, especially EDA tool vendors,” adds Sergio Marchese, technical marketing manager for OneSpin Solutions. “It’s the only way to address all the technical challenges of such a potentially powerful methodology.”
