( DAC 00 Item 44 ) --------------------------------------------- [ 7/13/00 ]
Subject: Camoflaged Birds -- Embedded Solutions Ltd. (ESL) & AmmoCore
SOMETIMES DIGGING PAYS OFF: One of the new companies at this year's DAC was
Embedded Solutions Ltd. (ESL for short.) These new embedded tools got me
curious. How did they work? How do they differ from other EDA tools? Then
I saw that Phil Mancuso, someone once famous from VHDL consulting and the
old VHDL wars, was their CEO! To make a technical story short, it turns out
that ESL makes a tool called "Handel-C" which synthesizes non-ANSI C into
an EDIF netlist targetted for FPGAs. ( http://www.embeddedsol.com ) It's
being packaged as an embedded systems emulator.
THEY'RE NOT EVEN REAL YET: Some tools that caught customers eyes were at
DAC but the EDA company was still in the concept stage. One such company
was AmmoCore. You won't find them listed in any directory; but they were
there talking to customers in the hallways, etc.
"AmmoCore: They do not have a real product yet, but their alpha version
to me it looks like a brilliant approach to process big designs. They
allow hierarchical designs with many small, automatically partitioned
blocks, utilizing existing P&R tools. Looks good because it is able to
process really big designs (35M gates in days). In addition, the
automatic partitioning and the small granularity of the partitioning
seem to allow modifications at a part of the design without necessarily
screw the whole block planning."
- an anon engineer
|
|
