It seems that every week brings news of a new startup in electronic system-level design, as well as ESL announcements from small, established EDA vendors. What's interesting is that the big EDA vendors are mostly silent when it comes to this emerging marketplace.

In this week's Design Automation section, we cover Synfora (www.synfora.com), whose "algorithm-to-tapeout synthesis" is based on the company's configurable intellectual property. Last week's ESL startup was Spiratech (www.spiratech.com), whose Cohesive ESL-to-RTL debugger works with protocol "adaptors" that bridge multiple levels of abstraction (see Nov. 10, page 10).

The week before that, Tenko Technologies introduced CvSDL (www.cvsdl.com), a C++ class library that embeds RTL Verilog semantics (see Nov. 3, page 10). And French EDA startup CoFluent Design (www.cofluentdesign.com) rolled out CoFluent Studio, a functional and architectural design tool (see Nov. 3, page 58). And that's only November!

On top of that have come announcements from established ESL providers such as Celoxica, CoWare, Forte, Summit Design and Vast Systems. All this activity would make you think that ESL is the new hot button in EDA, except for one question: Where are Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor Graphics?

In September, Cadence Design Systems basically exited the ESL market and turned its remaining products and technology over to CoWare. The company's Alta group is gone and the much-touted VCC co-design product has dropped out of sight. Mentor Graphics has Seamless hardware/software co-verification, but hasn't said much about ESL lately. That company's Renoir product has been folded into the HDL Designer Series.

Synopsys still has Behavioral Compiler, but that tool never came into widespread use. Nor did the company's more recent SystemC Compiler. But Synopsys' System Studio appears to be getting some traction in the marketplace.

It really seems like the big vendors have chosen to focus on RTL-to-GDSII design, leaving ESL to small companies and startups.

If ESL is the next wave of EDA, as some suggest, it's just possible that one of those small companies or startups will eventually become a big EDA vendor itself.

http://www.eet.com