From ESL 2010 to ESL 2015

In 2010, a wave of consolidation swept over the Electronic System Level (ESL) design industry. It brought ESL providers together with mainstream EDA houses and created opportunities for new ESL ventures. This paper contains short summaries of presentations in a special session focusing on the future of ESL. The session has two goals: the first is to present the state of the art in ESL tools and practice and, second, share a vision of the technical challenges that the next generation of ESL companies should address. The session includes a mix of perspectives from both ESL solution vendors and end-users and touches all all four ESL use cases: software virtual platforms, performance analysis, high level synthesis and verification.