IP/ESC 09 plays host to latest technology innovations

Covering IP, SoC and embedded systems on consecutive days, the IP/ESC'09 event, organised by IP web portal company, Design & Reuse, succeeded once again in providing some interesting insight into the IP and SoC markets. Panel sessions explored business and marketing issues, including the IP and fabless business models and technical sessions ranging from analogue IP design methodologies to the future of massively parallel computing. Beating the embedded software bottleneck Digital signal processor IP provider, CEVA, took the opportunity at IP/ESC'09 to preview its latest product introduction. The company has enhanced its software development environment with an Application Optimiser tool, claimed to significantly reduce software development time and improve performance by more than 60%. Available as part of the C-based CEVA-Toolbox software development environment, the Application Optimiser is claimed to eliminate hand written assembly code, simplifying and speeding up the software development process, as well as optimising performance of the target application. "SoCs have become much more complex, containing multicore and dsp subsystems," explained Eyal Bergman, director of product marketing. "With more functionality allocated to software, and the need to exploit parallelism, designs are harder to programme. The effort and cost involved in embedded software development has escalated," he said. "This makes embedded software development the primary bottleneck in the design cycle." The critical benefit of an all C-level tool suite is that the software specialists do not need to understand the detail of the hardware. "The CEVA-Toolbox effectively hides the complexity of the architecture," Bergman explained. Not only does the tool suite include all necessary DSP and communication IP libraries of C models, but also debugger connectivity to tools such as Matlab, for easy migration of algorithms, the company states. CEVA is an ARM partner, and the two companies' cores are commonly integrated into platform SoCs for mobile phone and other hand-held multimedia-oriented portable applications.