January 21, 2009 -- Recently, there has been quite some discussion at conferences and in the blogosphere about system-level design, specifically around the term electronic system level (ESL). The buzz mostly centers around which technologies should be considered part of ESL.
Some system-level advocates suggest limiting ESL to the next step above hardware. Others suggest it encompasses a variety of techniques, which only have in common the fact that they are applied prior to the register transfer level (RTL), which has been for at least the last 10 years and still is the pre-dominant entry point from which chip implementations are derived.
By Frank Schirrmeister. (Schirrmeister is Director, Product Management at Synopsys, Inc.)
This brief introduction has been excerpted from the original copyrighted article.
