Industry insiders have been saying for some time that the traditional electronic system design model, where hardware is developed and then software development follows, is no longer adequate. For one thing, the semiconductor industry's shifting focus toward consumer electronics products has resulted in dramatically shorter market windows, placing a premium on time-to-market that the traditional model cannot support.

The desire for concurrent hardware-software codesign has created strong momentum for the development of tools and methodologies based on electronic-system level (ESL) design, which after years of promise seem to be finally coming online.

Ajoy Bose, president, chairman and CEO of Atrenta Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), said hardware design is becoming increasingly cost prohibitive, noting as evidence the shrinking number of total industry design starts and the trend toward platform-based design. This, he said, is spurring a movement toward creating libraries of reusable software models that could make software design more affordable and less time consuming.

Chris Rowen, president and CEO of Tensilica Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.), pointed to a bifurcation in the market between mass-market products that need greater optimization and can afford to invest in more hardware development and niche-market products that for economic reasons need to rely more heavily on platform-based designs and greater software development.

Sanjay Srivastava, president and CEO of Denali Software Inc. (Palo Alto, Calif.), said part of the problem is that while hardware design productivity has steadily grown at a healthy annual rate, software design productivity is growing at a much slower rate — about 8 percent.

"A great deal of concurrency already exists today in the way that people develop hardware and software," said A.K. Kalekos, vice president of marketing and business development at ESL tool provider CoWare (San Jose). "But concurrent hardware-software design remains the holy grail."