August 31, 2005 -- Celoxica, Ltd. has published the results of the second annual worldwide design trends survey, conducted by Electronics Weekly and Celoxica. The results, revealed not only a significant planned increase in ESL methodology adoption, but demonstrated that much of the true market for ESL tools is "hidden" from much of the analysis of the market. The survey showed more than 40 percent of the market is outside the realm of hardware and semiconductor design, none of which are regularly polled by traditional analysis.

In this year's survey, open to the design community for two months between mid May and mid July 2005, 723 designers responded to more than 30 questions about current and future design activity.

Headlining the survey, 58 percent of designers recorded intent to increase their use of ESL design, with SystemC usage set to increase three-fold in next design projects. In 2006, 20 percent of FPGA designs will exceed five million gates and more than two-thirds of designers will use FPGAs coupled to an embedded processor, off-chip processor or DSP. FPGA based prototyping maintains its critical role in ASIC development, with 69 percent of ASIC designers reporting usage. FPGA designs with clock frequencies above 500Mhz are set to treble in 2006, though this figure is still well down on 500Mhz and >750Mhz ASIC design numbers.

Interestingly, the survey pointed out the growing use of FPGA and ESL by users not traditionally responsible for hardware design. Over 50% of algorithm developers reported using FPGA devices in their end products, and production FPGA usage was also high among systems and software engineers. This same group also reported the highest intent to use ESL tools in their next design projects.

"The survey confirms our experience that ESL design and programmable silicon are pushing the boundaries of EDA growth," said Jeff Jussel, vice president of marketing for Celoxica. "We are seeing adoption of ESL design acceleration across the board. Increasing size, complexity and the use of multiple HW and SW components and SoC in new designs mean that trend will continue."

The survey results also gave rise to issues that the design community and EDA vendors need to tackle. A massive 86 percent of designers reported no training in ESL design languages and nearly a quarter cited education and training as a key issue in encouraging ESL adoption.