Original Article can be located at Simple designs aren't easy, speaker says by This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it EE Times) (03/28/2006 8:45 PM EST)

"Ultimately, the quality of a design depends on the simplicity of its execution,"

"The art of design is the art of making the complex appear very simple."

"Code is what really counts," he said. "It's what I fought my way through as I was trying to put the chip together. Code, and data extracted from code, is the core form of communication between designers in IP-based SoC design."

More Excerpts here... 

Synopsys fellow Michael Keating outlined two "basic rules of design" that he said are often violated in practice. One is that if it's not tested, it's broken. Another is that if it's not simple, it will never work.

Referring to the code, Keating said, was faster and more accurate than reading the documentation. Further, the documentation was missing key information. "Documentation can be a reference, but it's not the solution to the communications problem between the IP provider and the customer," he said.

Keating's conclusion? "Code is what really counts," he said. "It's what I fought my way through as I was trying to put the chip together. Code, and data extracted from code, is the core form of communication between designers in IP-based SoC design."

But to be usable as a documentation tool, IP code has to be simple. And it takes a great deal of effort to structure simple code, Keating said. "Code is like a novel — it's read by many people," he said. "The secret to writing a novel is rewrite, rewrite, rewrite."

In simple code, Keating said, all structures are explicit. Simple code contains clearly perceptible patterns, a "reasonable" number of elements, and a regular structure. Keating said that hierarchical state machines, which have an explicit state space and structure, can have a dramatic effect in improving the readability of code.

It is easy for some people to see and detect patterns but it may not be so simple always. Any takes!!