The design tools for 28nm are inadequate at eliminating errors, and the analogue components needed for 28nm designs are not available, according to Hossein Yassaie, CEO of Imagination Technologies, a panel speaker at the International Electronics Forum 2010 this morning.
"We are the third largest IP company after ARM and Synopsys and are engaged with a variety of customers, large and small, designing very complex multimedia systems with communications. A lot of the problems are to do with the software – it takes ages to find out what’s wrong."
An example Yassaie gave was: "It took 21 days on an emulator to find the last remaining bug."
Yassaie’s solution was emulators which run ten times faster and the development of mini-emulators which could be given to the software people. "The software people need to be involved in emulation," he said.
The lack of analogue components at 28nm is a problem. "A lot of people would like to move to 28nm, but analogue components at 28nm are not available", said Yassaie.
"Validating an IP isn’t that difficult," said Yassaie, "but the moment you put this stuff together it gets difficult. We’re moving from chips which are running embedded software to embedded operating systems - put Android on a chip and then try to debug it."
Yassaie concluded: "I’d like to see tools that help people to design systems which prevent errors. I would like EDA companies to work with us to find out what we want, rather than throw new tools at us which we can’t relate to."