Forward And Backward Compatibility In IC Designs
By: Ann Steffora Mutschler
From architectural tradeoffs to reuse and standards, making sure a design carries forward is becoming more difficult.
The software world, of course, is used to dealing with continuous upgrades of technology, and this is especially true today for applications that rely on machine learning. “These applications are constantly learning and improving requiring downloadable upgrades. The software is usually run on very stable hardware platforms, but how do the platforms get upgraded or differentiated without having to rebuild them. Customization over time is essential to keep pace with changes in demand. One of the keys to doing that is to build a reconfigurable hardware platform to allow for that flexibility. There are lots of ways to achieve that, but many companies are adopting heterogeneous computing that includes different elements such as a software programmable engine, accelerators, and programmable logic. Incorporating all these components helps to meet low latency, performance, and capacity demands while still achieving flexibility in the platform. Ultimately, the idea is to extend the life of the hardware throughout the entire product lifecycle as continuous improvements to the applications are made. But doing this requires on-going verification. If we look at an Agile development flow, one of the principles is to perform continuous integration and testing. If we apply that to hardware development, we can begin to understand that as changes are made, verification must also be done to ensure that changes don’t introduce new bugs, safety issues, or security vulnerabilities,” pointed out Rob van Blommstein, head of marketing at OneSpin Solutions.
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The game console market shares some of the same demands. “The game console itself has to stay in the market for 10 to 15 years, so the interesting challenge is to provide something that is leading edge at the day of launch, but which still has enough power late in the lifecycle when the games get better and people demand more of a visual experience,” said Steven Woo, fellow and distinguished inventor at Rambus. “With cars, you’re trying to get the best hardware you can when you launch because you know things are going to get upgraded, and they have to stay relevant for a very long time. This speaks to the challenge of how to design everything to be forward-compatible by guessing what things are going to look like in the future. You have to have a relatively well thought out strategy for allowing that to happen into the future. When cars were beginning to support Bluetooth, a Bluetooth headset would work for a while, and then may not work if it was upgraded. Also, certain brands of Bluetooth headsets didn’t work in certain cars. This speaks a little bit to compatibility and a little bit to forward compatibility, which is a much harder thing to predict and plan for.”
