ESL Abstracts

ESL Product Direction Panel Discussion
ESL Driving Forces: Building the Correct System
10:00am - 11:30am
Moderator:  David Black, XtremeEDA
Companies face daunting challenges every day while adapting, adopting and driving innovation.  A focus on the changes occurring within engineering to deliver product to market and meet business critical needs demands more effort in system level exploration and design.  Mentor Graphics is investing in tools to close the gap between concepts, technology and developing robust systems.  The panel will provide updates on product direction and Q&A for Bridgepoint, Catapult C, and Vista.

Design of an Audio/Video RF Modulator Using Catapult C Synthesis
1:00pm - 2:00pm
Karl Renner | Systems Engineer | Texas Instruments
The presentation describes the design methodology in specifying a C code implementation of a digital RF modulator which combines audio and composite video, upsamples and modulates it for output at analog TV channel 3 or 4 frequencies.

TLM Platforms Re-Define Hardware Virtualization
2:15pm - 3:15pm
Jon McDonald | Senior Technical Marketing Engineer | Mentor Graphics
Hardware virtualization, in the context of ESL, has emerged from the need to integrate and test software with the target hardware early in the design process. This effort was led and executed mainly by software engineers who created a very abstract model of the hardware called PV (Programmable View) on which they could run the software. This high-level model of the hardware platform is now taking another step in systems design to address architecture design and exploration and is becoming an important aspect of any design process. This is driven from the complexity of current systems and multi-core architectures, where software not only applies the functionality of the desired application, but also plays a major role in the way the system performs. Application tasks need to be distributed onto various cores and software developers who use virtual platforms should also look into the impact of the software on the performance and power of the underlying hardware. 

We will present the Vista scalable modeling methodology based on TLM 2.0 that is designed to model a hardware platform while maintaining register accurate behavior, as well as approximate timing and power of the hardware. We will discuss how this platform is created and distributed to the software domain and what are the key attributes that impact performance during software execution. We will also present a case study of how such a virtual TLM platform can be used for hardware/software partitioning and analysis ahead of the RTL implementation phase.

Full System Design and Compact Software Code with BridgePoint xtUML
3:30pm - 4:30pm
Bill Chown | Product Group Director | Mentor Graphics
Use Model Driven Development (MDD) to create system-level models, integrated with requirements tracing, that can be executed to validate design intent. Apply functional decomposition techniques to derive partitioning and hardware mapping, and directly generate high performance, compact application code for the software functions. This session will show how xtUML enables an MDD flow to accelerate mobile system design, reduce errors and improve delivery against requirements, with high quality and performance results.