Frank Schirrmeister From development of real-time software, through chip design and product management in EDA, I am excited to help drive system-level design over the chasm and to make it mainstream! Please also check out my monthly column 
Johannes Stahl has been working on system-level design methodologies and wireless design projects for 20+ years. As a marketing director at Synopsys he is responsible for algorithm design and high–level synthesis.
Marc Serughetti brings over 15 years of experience in embedded software covering simulation, IDE, compiler and debuggers as well as OS, middleware and application frameworks. He currently drives Synopsys virtual prototyping solutions.
Tom De Schutter has over 10 years experience in System-Level Solutions. At Synopsys he drives the customer processor design solution using Processor Designer, the TLM model library for architecture design and virtual prototyping solutions and the IP vendor relationships for System-Level Solutions.
Pat Sheridan has 25 years experience in the marketing and business development of high technology products. At Synopsys he drives the SoC architecture design solution using Platform Architect and serves as the Board member to the Open SystemC Initiative.Calling Even More Spirits …
Posted by Frank Schirrmeister on December 1st, 2009
This is a follow-up post to my previous post on effort related to hardware and software design called “Riding the Software Hockey Stick”. I did get a couple of comments, which are related to the the validity of the the data I presented. Well, sometimes you just have to admit that you were wrong … So what did I do wrong? This was not quite as bad as the spirits I had called in my blog conversation with Ran Avinun from Cadence (for the non-Germans, the reference to “the spirits I called” comes from an old Goethe poem).
I was very excited to try out a new tool I downloaded to try the animation of .gif files. So why not combine my experiment with some blogging? I had participated to questions to some of the surveys we did here at Synopsys, specifically as it relates to the effort spent during projects on hardware and software development. The question we asked was “What percentage of your total project effort is spent on software development (vs. hardware development) during design?”. We asked this question at several events starting at the Synopsys User Group (SNUG) in Santa Clara 2008, all the way through 2008 at the other worldwide SNUG events and then through 2009 at DVCon and two virtual conferences.
Using my new tool I have the animated those results and then claimed a trend towards more software versus hardware. Brian Bailey rightfully pointed out that I should not have put the results from different events in sequence in order to determine a trend. And he is right, this is where I went wrong, even though the animation looks nice and seemed to indicate a trend.
The second set of comments was related to the animation itself, that it was difficult to follow and also difficult on the eyes. So below you find the data in an un-animated fashion. I also followed Jacob Engblom’s recommendation to check on the different communities which actually answered the survey.
My take away from all this is as follows:
- While I was wrong to indicate a trend over time, the importance of software the overall chip related project development effort remains unquestionably an important issue.
- Results of the survey taken at the Virtual Multicore Conference 2009 skews the data the most, given the very high percentage of software engineers and system architects.
- The communities for the first three data sets and also the final one are pretty closely comparable.
- Going forward I will try to make sure that we ask the same questions on the community definition to make sure that we can compare the communities.
At the end of the day I lost a little bit too eager to try to outline a trend here, but when looking at the data objectively it is very clear that software is very important for project success. The fact that this is true across different communities who answered the surveys makes it even more sticky.
Thank you now for your reference the data I had animated right next to each other:
RSS
Now I have to take my hat off to you Frank. It takes someone special to own up to their mistakes in public and to try and correct the wrong. You have done an awesome job presenting the data this time and it has now become an article that is worth preserving because of the data it holds.
I totally agree with your modified statement – software is very important and it is very likely that it will grow over time. I am not yet certain where it will plateau, but I think it will be considerably higher than where we are now.
Thanks!
Even if I have to nag you that the bar graphs are a bit hard to read still… any chance to make them readable without clicking to open separate windows? And using consistent colors for the communities across the graphs?
And I fully agree that software is important. That is something we have been hearing for many years now. For real systems companies, hardware design is a diminishingly small part of value, while 80-90% comes from the software they produce to glue together hardware they buy from various standard parts vendors.