SAN FRANCISCO — The Design Automation Conference dispatched a panel to probe the mysteries of hardware/software codesign yesterday afternoon, but came up with more questions than answers, even from the vendors.

The one consensus that emerged from the discussion was that too often codesign is confused with coverification. "A lot of supposedly codesign tools are actually just coverification tools," said Fred Rose, senior principal research scientist at Honeywell Inc. Rose lamented the lack of tools for use early in a design process before the design has been firmly partitioned into hardware and software components.

Ryan Fetter, director of development at vendor Omniview Design Inc. backed up Rose's complaint. "By the time coverification tools come in to play, the design team has already made a commitment to much of the architecture." Fetter suggested that this was not the appropriate time to discover poor choices in the partitioning between hardware and software, or in the choice of hardware cores.

A second major theme of the panel members was the preponderance of software problems in the codesign world. "In our experience, on large, multiprocessor projects, system development costs are dominated by software costs," Rose reported. These costs arise both in the initial development of software, which frequently consumes more engineer-days than hardware development, and in the growing task of system integration. Ominously, Rose suggested that if vendors were required to report unpaid overtime, cost estimates on such projects might double.

Pointing to the size of the software problem, Rose and other panel members called for increased utilization of the Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools that have been shown to help. But for embedded designs, Rose emphasized, the CASE tools must be closely integrated with hardware design automation tools, forming a single environment.