Industry Expert Blogs

Electronic design automation (EDA) will change rapidly and dramatically if Gadi Singer, vice president and general manager of Intel's SoC Enabling Group, has his way. In a keynote speech at the Design Automation Conference June 8 titled "The Imminent EDA Transformation," Singer called on the EDA industry to "expand the envelope" and address entire systems, while providing "vertical" tuning and optimization across the complete hardware and software stack.

This was not just another electronic system level (ESL) talk, although ESL is part of the solution. Singer proposed a bold new way of approaching electronic design, one that is very compatible with the EDA360 vision of application-driven design -- in fact, in his keynote, Singer called out the EDA360 vision paper published by Cadence as an "excellent analysis" of trends in the industry. This was also not a ten-years-from-now kind of talk. Singer described design approaches in use at Intel today, in spite of the lack of support from commercial EDA tools.

Singer started his talk by identifying the "compelling user experience" as the driving force behind today's unprecedented pace of innovation. Better silicon enables rather software applications, which creates even more user expectation and demand. "We're in the early stages of this cycle," he said. "There is so much more headroom for silicon to have better power and performance, and for software and applications to take advantage of that."

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