by Dick Selwood, IC Design and Verification Journal

Let’s start with some thundering generalisations. It is taking too long to bring SoCs to the market. A big bottleneck, and a large and growing part of the overall cost of an SoC, is developing the software to run on the embedded processors. It is often not possible to begin software development until the chip architecture has been pinned down, which severely limits the influence that the software team can have over the architecture. The desk-top development environment, in which software is usually developed, behaves differently to the target environment. Hardware prototypes in, for example, FPGAs, if they are created, are different again, expensive to create and usually available only late in the development cycle. When the chip becomes available, debugging software running in it can be a nightmare.

This string of problems is only going to get worse as multiple cores, heterogeneous and homogeneous, become the norm for SoCs. If it is not easy to develop software for a single processor, software for multiple processors is recognised as being even more difficult to write and horrendously more difficult to debug.

OK. Common ground so far, and almost every presentation you have sat through covers aspects of this. Why rehearse it again?

Because, if Simon Davidmann and his team at Imperas have got it right, the situation is changing and changing radically.

Simon Davidmann is a very successful serial entrepreneur, with enormous experience in EDA. His web-based CV (Curriculum Vitae or Resume) lists 5 start-ups where he played a significant role. Much of his work has been with some aspect of EDA pioneering, and the list includes names and products like HiLo, SystemVerilog, VCS, and Ambit. His last company, Co-Design Automation, which he co-founded in 1998 and managed as President, CEO and Chairman, was sold to Synopsys for $36 million in mid-2002. He left Synopsys in 2003 and soon after founded Imperas. He (and his team) then spent several years (and, he estimates, about $4 million) developing the basis for a solution of the SoC software problem – a virtual modelling environment for developing software for systems using multiple processors.

Then what did he do?

He only …

[Read the full article at IC Design And Verificaton Journal here]

[To download a pdf click here]

There is now a very good and comprehensive Technical Paper on Virtual Platforms by leading ESL consultant Brian Bailey - this is available to registered users on the main download page under the Whitepapers list.

An automatically transcribed interview with Simon Davidmann by Jack Horgan of EDACafe.

Last October I wrote an article entitled “ Can a Firm Prosper or Even Survive, If It Gives Away Its Product? about Ciranova. Recently I found another company, namely Imperas, that just gave away its technology. I was tempted to chalk it up to naiveté but Imperas CEO Simon Davidmann is a successful serial entrepreneur involved with 8 successful EDA startups. He is a believer in “Blue Ocean Strategy” which calls for going after new markets rather than fighting for market share in existing markets. I had an opportunity to interview Simon at DAC.

Would you give us a brief biography?
I have a checkered history in that I have been sort of in and out of EDA several times. I was a researcher in the UK in simulation. I got lured away from research to build something which became known as HILO which was a logic simulator back in the early 80s. It was really the first logic simulator that could handle timing and behavioral modeling. We got acquired by Genrad. They used it for board testing. One of the guys who worked on that was Phil Moorby. Our first customer was in the states. This evolved and turned into Verilog. Phil went and built Verilog. I went off into the music business and built embedded systems for musical instruments, electronic percussion instruments.

I had been in universities (Essex and Brunel) and done simulation research in EDA. I thought that I would like to build things, something practical. I played guitar and got to know guys who played drums. We built this electronic percussion company. It became pretty famous and made several million pounds a year. About $10 million at the peak but in the end it went bust. We spent money on airplanes and racing cars. We had those kinds of things. We had a good time and worked very hard. When I look back at it we had some wild technology. The last product I built had five processors in it. It had a graphics controller and CRT. This was the mid-eighties. It was just like a Macintosh. It had all this DSP audio stuff, a complete synthesizer, an audio recorder, sampler and tracker. It was a drum kit. These guys just hit it with sticks. It was a very interesting experience. I went to a lot of good gigs with a load of world class musicians. We had a lot of fun. But sadly the Japanese came and built better porducts, no not better but cheaper products that were easier to use and more reliable. We could not compete. The English engineering just could not do it. We did not have the scale to do it better.

So I went back into EDA and became the first European employee for Gateway (Design Automation) with Verilog. Gateway was in Boston. I spent a lot of time…

[To read the full transcription, visit here]

Brian Bailey – EDA Consultant

Abstract
For many years, Electronic System Level (ESL) design and verification has been on the cusp of widespread adoption, but never seems to get there. Universities and companies claim to have the necessary breakthrough only to see the technology sit there for years or the company to hobble along without ever really becoming a success. Is this because ESL is failing to deliver on the promises or that the products are flawed? Is it because the preconceived notion of ESL is wrong? In this whitepaper the reasons behind this are investigated and the roles of a System Level Virtual Prototype (SLVP) will be discussed. Imperas Inc. recently announced their Open Virtual Platforms (OVP) initiative which may provide the missing piece of the puzzle to jump start successful commercial deployment of ESL flows.

Introduction
Electronic Design Automation (EDA) flows are built on the fundamental premise that models are freely interchangeable amongst vendors and have interoperability amongst them. This means that models can…

[To read more, download a copy here]

Imperas Launches Open Virtual Platforms
by Bryon Moyer, Embedded Technology Journal

Seeding a saturated solution for optimal crystal growth can be a
tricky business. The highest-quality, largest crystals grow when
given lots of time for the molecules to orient themselves in the
lattice. Seeding too late can result in chaotic explosive nucleation,
small granularity, and low quality. Seed too early, and, well, there
may not technically be a problem, but being an impatient species,
if we don’t see crystal growth quickly enough, we tend to get
bored and move the seed elsewhere.
Saturation is something of a measure of potential, of pentup
demand. There is more and more willingness to orient
along coordinated lines, but that initial seed is missing, around
which everything can congregate. The multicore market, while…

[For more, read the article here, or if it is not there, download a copy here]

Simon Davidmann ED Online ID #18725 April 14, 2008

“You say you want a revolution? Well, you know . . . we all want to change the world.”

John Lennon penned that opening line of The Beatles’ “Revolution” in 1968. And it’s just as relevant now as it was 40 years ago. The electronics industry stands on the threshold of an era of creative innovation as it rushes toward multicore system-on-a-chip (SoC) design.

The increased number of processors in consumer devices that formed the multicore trend has disrupted the existing sequential software flow. Unlike Lennon’s lyric that promised a revolution, the electronics industry is still waiting for one to manage the way in which multicore architectures can be handled in a productive and efficient manner.

Of course, virtual platforms with proprietary languages have been introduced throughout the last 10 years or so, but have lacked…

[For more, read the article here, or if it is not there, download a copy here]

EDACafe Interviews Simon Davidmann, April 2nd 2008

VDC Embedded Systems Practice, March 7th 2008

http://ontargetembedded.blogspot.com/
Posted by VDC Embedded Systems Practice
Friday, March 07, 2008 What Happened?

This week Imperas announced the release of its Open Virtual Platforms to “establish a common, open standard solution for developers to quickly and inexpensively simulate embedded software on system-on-chip (SoC) designs.”

Through the OVP Initiative, Imperas will provide what it claims to represent $4 million worth of its own R&D effort, including:

• OVPmodels - Open source model libraries of processors, components, peripherals, and templates which others are free to use, edit/update, and copy
• OVP APIs - APIs for developing models and verification infrastructure provided with no attached licensing costs
• OVPsim – A free reference simulator delivered as an executable solution (with limits on the source code availability and licensing terms)

Imperas has solicited the participation of the industry and has already gathered an impressive group of market leaders to join the initiative including IP suppliers such as MIPS, Tensilica, Denali, and notable ESL/EDA players like EVE, Forte, Carbon Design Systems, Calypto, CriticalBlue, and others. The company is still working out the details, but currently plans to manage the initiative and host the OVP community forum itself going forward.

Imperas believes that by opening up its virtual platform technology and simulation offering to the market at large, it may be possible to drive industry-standard practices around virtual platform development and help guide the market towards improved methods of software development/system simulation on complex hardware architectures. The company anticipates that by moving the market forward in this area, it can then build its business around software verification technologies, multi-core development, and other solutions complimentary to system simulation and virtual platforms. Expect more announcements from Imperas around their products at next month’s Multicore Expo.

VDC’s View
Imperas has certainly been coy about its overall product direction prior to this point, providing only small clues about its products and where it might play in terms of the overall ESL and multi-core software development space. This announcement provides a clearer sense of how the company will approach the market going forward.

There is no question that if the industry is able to agree on a set of common set of standards for building virtual platforms (what VDC has typically referred to as the virtual system prototyping/simulation market), market participants would be in a better position to collaborate with one other, leverage existing designs, and raise the overall level of productivity in creating virtual prototypes (something that is clearly needed for virtual platform methodologies to be successful in the long run). This is something that established virtual platform vendors such as Virtutech, VaST, Synopsys, CoWare, and ARM have been driving towards for some time now (though their vision of how this is to evolve is certainly different from Imperas’s particular approach in this case).

An open source model is an interesting concept here, and the early list of participants is encouraging, especially at the semiconductor IP level. Open source software has certainly changed the landscape in numerous software markets to date, and in VDC’s opinion a move toward this type of a model has the potential to alter the dynamics of the current market. The extent to which Imperas creates an environment that fits the real needs of the broader community and shares in the development and ownership of the technology is likely a key factor to its long term appeal and success. A critical next step will be to bring more parties to the table, including big EDA tools vendors, other semi IP suppliers, and the semiconductor suppliers themselves. VDC has noted a continued investment by IC suppliers in investing in product enablement through virtual platform technologies.

Imperas’s view that an established virtual platform market is the bridge to better multi-core software development and verification is likely in line with the views of many other market participants. In fact, if the company is able to propel greater industry standardization around virtual platform design and simulation, Imperas should expect increasing competition from bigger EDA companies at the software verification level.

While it is far too early to tell what impact this will have on the market, it will be certainly be interesting to gauge the reaction of other virtual platform tools providers and the rest of the market. Richard Goering also wrote an interesting piece on this announcement earlier this week.

Posted by VDC Embedded Systems Practice at 12:55 PM

Gabe Moretti, EDA DesignLine, March 5th 2008

On Monday Imperas announced that it is providing some high-level processor models, APIs for building platform verification infrastructure and developing behavioral and processor models, and OVPSim, a reference simulator. These will be downloadable for free from an OVP website or from SourceForge, an open-source code repository.

The company has valued its donation to $4 million, which is not a small amount of money for a startup. My first question was if Simon Davidmann, the founder of Imperas, had suddenly decided to give his wealth away and join a monastery. But that illusion quickly dissipated, since I do know Simon, and although his debating abilities would certainly help any order he joins, the monastic life style just does not fit him.

So why would a startup decide to put all of its existing ‘products’ into the public domain? The answer is simple: market creation. Although I have no doubt that what Imperas has managed to develop since its inception has significant engineering worth, the company has so far not met the high market visibility that Simon had predicted for his new company to anyone would listen shortly after he had sold Co-Design Automation to Synopsys. The market for Virtual Platforms is limited, and the competition from Mentor and Synopsys quite difficult to overcome because they can offer an entire suite of tools that carries a design team from architectural design through software integration and debug, to hardware design.

As the rest of the ESL companies can attest, this is not an exploding market, and growth is possible but slow and requires significant more investments than one could have planned a few years ago. Therefore, proving that he is not only a good engineer, but also an above average marketeer, Simon has instantly created a community, using the same market obstacles that would have challenged his company, to project it in the limelight and obtain support from the ESL community, always eager to find a new way to expand the market.

There are two major obstacles to the success of the Open Virtual Platform initiative. First of all, other companies must see the value of the site and donate valuable models and technology to it, and must do this is a short, say six months, period of time. Second, Imperas needs to build ‘for profit’ products that will not conflict with free donated technology. In other words, its competitors can render its life quite hard, simply by donating to OVP technology that competes with what Imperas intends to sell.

The Bottom Line
The industry will welcome OVP and will try to use it, after all ‘Open-Source’ is a key word lately since people equate it to ‘free stuff’. I think the following are the components of a successful OVP donation:

- The Imperas donations need to prove themselves valuable outside of the Imperas tools ecosystem.
- Processors and multi-processors vendors must provide free models to it.
- Other EDA companies must donate related technology to the site.
- Designers must find the site’s contents valuable as building blocks for their own internal design flows. An open-source components that cannot be used, is worthless.

So let’s wait. May be at DAC in June, you will find not only little placards in various exhibit booths proclaiming that the vendor is a member of OVP, but actual demos of how an OVP donation is being integrated in someone’s flow.

By Richard Goering

03/03/08

• C language APIs for building platform verification infrastructure, and developing behavioral and processor models.
• Open-source library of models for processors, components, peripherals, and platform templates.
• OVPsim, a free reference simulator shipped as an executable.

According to Simon Davidmann, Imperas CEO, OVP is the most important…

[For more, read the article here, or if it is not there, download a copy here]