Nikkei Electronics Asia -- August 2007
Design View from Japan
DAC 2007 Features Analog Applications, Automotive

The 44th Design Automation Conference (DAC 2007), the biggest event in the electronics design automation (EDA) industry, was held in San Diego, California, June 4-8. The organizer selected automotive as the theme for this year's DAC, and multiple papers were presented in accordance with this theme. Exhibitions were also based on automotive, with vendor booths showing models of racing cars on the hall floor.

Changes in Vehicles
On the first day, June 4, Lawrence D Burns, VP of Research & Development and Strategic Planning at General Motors Corp (GM) of the US, gave a keynote speech entitled "Designing a New Automotive DNA". In this, he predicted that the automotive market will continue to expand, showing a 100-fold increase in volume by 2020, with the world market at 1.1 billion units - an ownership ratio of 15%.

The major change in vehicles will be a shift from mechanical drive to electric drive, he continued, and explained the ways in which vehicles will change as a result. To help the audience follow his talk, he presented videos of the GM concept car and other futuristic cars. The actual concept car was on display at the entrance to the hall where the keynote speech was given, to the delight of visitors. At the end of the speech Burns introduced the design software used by GM in vehicle development, stressing the importance of model-based development techniques.

Over a dozen other papers also focused on the automotive industry. Presentations on June 6 in particular were related to vehicles for the entire day in one conference room. Many papers dealt with networking the numerous electronic control units (ECU) mounted in modern vehicles. A high-end automobile can have close to a hundred ECUs, each of which includes a microcontroller (MCU). Interconnecting ECUs into a network is the equivalent of connecting multiple processors to each other. 

The concept of efficiently interconnecting multiple processors is also crucial in system-on-chips (SoC) with multi-processor cores. The EDA industry has been working on electronic system level (ESL) tools to find an efficient network between processor cores, and a number of papers indicated that these ESL tools can be applied to interconnecting ECUs in vehicles as well. Many ESL tools can check not only that connected processor cores are functioning correctly, but also that they meet performance targets.

Analog Newcomers
It is clear that the automotive industry is a promising field for the EDA industry, but it may take some time before it becomes a paying business. In fact, exhibitions of tools slated for release in the near future revealed none aimed at the automotive industry. There were a number of exhibitions stressing design for manufacturability (DFM) last year and the year before, but this year only a few vendors emphasized DFM.

The exhibition hall was fairly lackluster, but new tools for analog were one high point. The Analog Rails Div of Get2Spec Inc of the US, Silicon Canvas Inc of the US, and Syncira Corp of the US are examples of companies involved in automated layout design of analog circuit blocks.

Neolinear Inc of the US, now part of Cadence Design Systems Inc of the US, attracted interest in the past with its automatic analog layout design tools. The second generation of these tools was displayed at DAC 2007 (Neolinear's tools are regarded as the first generation). First-generation tools could only handle a narrow range, while second-generation tools are not only simpler to use, but also handle larger circuit scales and yield higher precision.

by Ikutaro Kojima

MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

24 Hours | 7 Days