Design Service House Promises Co-Design

Electronic News, Oct 11, 1999 by Gale Morrison

Design Software recently exchanged e-mails with Brian Kelley, the new national business manager at Intrinsix, an independent ASIC design services company in Westboro, Mass. Kelley's view shows that design consultants outside of the EDA Big Three (Cadence Design Systems Inc., Mentor Graphics Corp. and Synopsys Inc.) can be equally ambitious, especially when it comes to hardware/software co-design.

"There's a growing need to combine embedded software, system verification environments and traditional ASIC consulting into a unified development process," Kelley said. "Intrinsix is responding to that. We will provide the ASIC device and associated low-level software elements as a unified service offering."

System-on-a-chip (SOC) designs are being developed by teams of hardware and firmware developers, he said. "They are focusing on substantially similar tasks in creating diagnostics, boot code, low-level device drivers and other software elements that are closely associated with the hardware design.

"By working together, a substantial amount of code reuse is possible between the verification and firmware teams. Early system models are also made available for firmware development long before the first silicon prototypes are available," he attested. "These models also provide debugging visibility into the internal SOC design that are not available using traditional silicon prototype methods."