VHDL International Sets Foundation for System-Level Design

Steven E. Schulz Senior Member, Technical Staff Texas Instruments Former President of the Board of Directors VHDL International

Indications are strong that the electronics industry is indeed inching toward a higher level of abstraction and system-level design. The most noticeable are the number of design language proposals from Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software suppliers introduced over the past six months. To some industry watchers, it might appear confusing. It's instead a sign that the EDA industry understands the problem and is rising to the challenge.

The electronics industry is being forced to move to a more efficient system-level design methodology. Design has gotten more complex and good engineering practices have been abandoned as time and resource constraints consume the project cycle.

The VHDL and Verilog hardware description languages (HDLs) have served the designer community well for more than 10 years. We've enhanced them, modified them, and added extensions to prolong their usefulness. They were not planned to tackle the challenges of system-level design, however. It's time to move beyond HDLs to address these new challenges.

Industry organizations like VHDL International (VI) can help guide the research, and develop standards to meet the requirements for a new system-level design methodology. VI has an enthusiastic and active user membership, the mission and infrastructure, and unbiased and motivated technial committees. As a result, we are dedicated to maximizing the productivity, effectiveness, and capabilities of electronics designers worldwide.

For example, VI's System Level Design Language (SLDL) Initiative has introduced a technology roadmap for evolving hardware description level (HDL)-based design. The roadmap is meant to set a consistent direction for an all-inclusive design environment, based on existing and emerging EDA software standards to enable system-level design. It provides a strategic implementation plan to bundle current and future design requirements. More important, the roadmap is not a static offering. Work is ongoing, success is being shown, and industry luminaries are being attracted to help in the work because of its great promise of timely success.

The roadmap extends the VI charter from solely promoting widespread HDL usage to being a primary vehicle for corporate standard making and evolving the design environment to address the entire system. With the roadmap, we're setting the direction, priorities, and commitment to the development and consistency of technical standards for system design now and into the next decade.

Phase 1 of SLDL produced a language called Rosetta, an effort to map constraints across semantic domains within the electronics-centric systems engineering world. It has borrowed concepts from system-level research efforts across Europe and the U.S.

A new design language must support the ability to quickly trade off architectures and implementations based on system-wide constraints. To Rosetta, a system is composed of many views, including digital function, analog behavior, timing, bandwidth or throughput, power consumption, and cost.

Rosetta has integrated multiple domain theories into a common semantic framework, and supports the ability to budget and decompose system-wide constraints across all views of hardware and software. It is a system language, complementary with both Verilog HDL and VHDL, as well as familiar software programming languages like C, C++, Java, and the various emerging design language proposals. It does not compete with any of these or other design language proposals, since no other language describes declarative design constraints at the system level.

VI and its SLDL Initiative borrowed from the Rosetta Stone's language concepts as a way to set a consistent direction for an all-inclusive system-level design environment. The Rosetta Stone, on permanent display at the British Museum, has played a vital role in enabling scientists to translate languages used around the world. Through this mapping process, linguists have been able to understand the semantic meaning embodied in the written word. We intend to be equally successful in our endeavor.

The number of new design language proposals is a sign that the electronics industry is indeed moving to system-level design. As a result, the limitations imposed on electronics designers will be lifted to ensure ongoing innovation and rapid industry growth and expansion.