Professor Kurt Keutzer of UC Berkeley has been developing EDA tools and worrying about EDA issues since he started working for AT&T Bell Labs in 1984. He joined logic-synthesis pioneer and leader Synopsys in 1991 and eventually became the company's chief technical officer and vice president of research. He then joined the Berkeley faculty in 1998. 

Kurt Keutzer is looking for a disruptive technology to become the universally acknowledged ESL design methodology. Such a methodology, he said, will have three elements: 

• It will deliver at least 10× the productivity of existing system-level design-entry methods
• It will improve functional verification efficiency by 10× to 100×
• It will provide a predictable, reliable, single-pass system-design and implementation method that also provides designers with the ability to refine and improve their designs.
  

No ESL tools have yet emerged that efficiently map high-level system descriptions onto collections of heterogeneous or homogeneous processors. Keutzer does not expect that such tools will emerge from the now-dominant EDA companies. However, once more agreeing with Gartner/Dataquest's Smith, he predicts that the annual market for such tools will surpass $1 billion within the next three years.

Any Takers!!