Gamification of System-on-Chip design

This paper presents drastic new concepts for SoC design tools. The motivation is ever increasing productivity gap that is caused by complexity of the design process with current methods. Plain code, schematic block diagrams and various graph-tree-table descriptions have been there for tens of years. Unfortunately, designers have problems in understanding the big picture of the design and quickly finding the interesting points. As an example, capturing register/memory definitions are simply getting impossible when different operation points of the system change them at runtime. We envision gamification as a new SoC design paradigm. It includes 3D visualization and semantic zoom to capture the design content, and gameplay for the design process. As the result, SoC design becomes engaging and users can easier focus on making the essential design decisions. A demo game is under construction and will be presented in forthcoming publications.