News
July 28, 2004 Taiwan Release

Exsedia Supports the Creation of High-Performance Mobile Computing Solutions in Programmable Logic, Allowing Leadership

EDA company Exsedia announces its latest release of Nimbus, which supports the creation of high-IP content logic solutions for telecommunication and network communications.

"Recently, a number of market drivers are causing a transition in the marketplace, trends which Exsedia feels substantiate its claim that Nimbus provides significant value as a "productivity amplifier" in the creation of original-content, algorithm-rich component models for use in mobile systems design," says CEO Zak Bahrom.

One of these drivers is the emergence of reconfigurable, adaptive computing platforms that offers a viable alternate to using embedded processors in mobile communications designs. Solutions can be developed on FPGA-based programmable logic devices that are extremely competitive with processor-based modules for implementing networking protocols.

Speed through custom logic

Custom logic is known to provide higher-performance computing, sometimes delivering 100X the throughput over a comparable embedded processor-based solution. In addition, competitive packaging costs and lower-power consumption in programmable logic devices now offers a viable alternative platform for delivering communications solutions involving integration of multiple protocols, or protocol versions, onto a single network processing chip.

The main driver for selecting custom logic on FPGAs is the need for better performance in arithmetic processing than is possible using available processor cores. The calculations are very compute intensive, involving the custom design of multiplier circuits capable of handling these operations at high speeds. Applications including MPEG decompression, encryption and decryption, and error correcting codes to compensate for noisy media are examples where performance with minimal resource consumption are critical to success of future mobile computing and communications products. This is where designing architectures for programmable logic come into play, and where Nimbus can help quickly realize a path, according to Bahrom.

Exploring hardware architecture

"High-performance module designers need a means to quickly specify an algorithm or protocol description, and explore architecture tradeoffs that best realize the algorithm or protocol being developed in silicon," he says. "This is where Exsedia's Nimbus product shines, in that its easy-to-use and intuitive design method allows design architects to focus on the semantics of an application model without having to deal with the details of depicting that model in a hardware description language. Once a model has been created and verified using Nimbus' cycle-based simulator, high-quality and field-proven synthesizable VHDL and Verilog code can automatically be generated from the ASM models."

While many EDA vendors are talking about the benefits of moving design to the ESL, Exsedia is demonstrating that there is still much to be gained from carrying out the design at the RTL and Behavioral levels for this critical set of functionality in mobile computing platforms. This is especially true for the design of those performance-critical components of products in the mobile computing market space. With market pressure to provide deeper function integration, at lower cost, in a small product footprint, utilizing minimal power consumption to conserve critical battery life, systems makers are looking for a path to get the high-value logic content into product quickly, from which derivative products can be built.

Exsedia's Nimbus provides just such a path, in that it supports rapid architecture specification and exploration of the solution space in order to realize high-value logic content models quickly. Then, by using the field-proven Nimbus VHDL/Verilog code generator technology, these critical control and data path models can be integrated with other language-based models for creating SoC-based solutions for programmable logic.

Communication systems built

One such success story involves the protocol design being carried out at the University of South Carolina's Reconfigurable Computing Laboratory, which has been involved in research into next-generation 802.11-based wireless LAN technology.

According to Dr. James Davis, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of South Carolina, they have been using ASM design methods for several years, having been an early adopter of Nimbus, and have created a number of models for protocol extensions to the 802.11 MAC layer for use in different applications in mobile ad-hoc networking, in addition to models for MPEG-based compression and block-based encryption applications.

"Nimbus has been instrumental in our ability to build a number of different protocol models, make easy extensions, and use these as the basis for exploring the performance of the designs in terms of area, power consumption, latency and throughput," says Davis.

"In addition, we can have our student and researchers develop models that execute the networking protocols and the custom coding scheme extensions between 50x-100x faster than what would be available using existing embedded processor-based technology, while also giving us the flexibility to make extensive protocol modifications. We could not have managed the design complexity for the concurrent state machine design, or the high-performance arithmetic circuit designs, nor could we have done this level of design space exploration-which is to locate the most optimal tradeoffs in design constraints between systems-level and device-level issues-if we didn't have Nimbus. It is simply an indispensable part of our design flow."