Introduction
Competition in the electronic market place is growing. The vast majority of new electronic products are destined for the consumer market. This market is very price sensitive and vendors must make a profit while selling their product at very low margins. Companies must, therefore, keep development costs low and schedules short in order to remain competitive. But all electronic product development projects are guided by the need to do more with less and in a shorter time. As the number of functions offered by each product increases the design complexity grows at an even greater rate, putting significant pressure on design teams.
Semiconductor companies can now fabricate about one billion transistors on a single die. With such fabrication capabilities at hand, engineers build entire systems in a single integrated circuit. Many of these System on Chip（SoC）designs contain both analog and digital hardware, one or more processor cores, and large amounts of software stored in ROM or EPROM memory on the chip. The EPROM solution allows product upgrading in the field as well as an opportunity to fix design bugs found after product release. But the cost of fixing bugs in the field is many times the cost of fixing them early in the design process.
Designs are so complex that engineers can no longer architect a product at the familiar register transfer level（RTL）. Electronic System Level（ESL）tools and methodologies typically work at higher levels of design abstraction to help manage the complexity problem. Abstraction is necessary in order to architect an optimized hardware and software design to increase execution speed, minimize power consumption, and achieve the highest possible level of functionality. In addition, ESL tools can provide many orders of magnitude of increased simulation performance to enable design validation to keep up with design complexity.
In order to meet both cost and schedule objectives, design teams are reusing previously designed modules, purchasing third party Intellectual Property（IP）, and implementing functions in software. The software content of SoCs has grown substantially such that many design teams now spend more time on software development than on hardware design. It is increasingly important to provide programmers with a system prototype as soon as possible to allow them to debug their code while much of the hardware development is still taking place.
