ARM and Infineon cores seed IP-on-board market

ARM and Infineon cores seed IP-on-board market
By Peter Clarke, EE Times
October 25, 2000 (6:03 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20001025S0047

LONDON — Verification specialists Quickturn Design Systems Inc. and Simutech Corp. have collaborated to produce a CoreBoard containing an ARM7TDMI bonded-out core.

At the same time, Infineon Technologies AG (Munich, Germany) has announced it is working with Simutech (San Jose, Calif.) to place its own Carmel DSP on a CoreBoard and demonstrate over-Internet evaluation of the DSP core using a Simutech Evalab core-evaluation system.

"Within Infineon, we strongly believe that online evaluation is now becoming a necessary deliverable by intellectual-property providers . . . and the initial signs are that Simutech's Evalab platform is an excellent deployment mechanism," said Alex Bedarida, vice president for Infineon's DSP cores and modules division.

As a result of the Quickturn-Simutech collaboration, CoreBoards can either be used with Simutech's Evalab platform or be slotted into the Rapid Prototyping System (RPS) from Quickturn (San Jose), since the companies have used a common board-level architecture.

Evalab, launched in June, is a hardware/software system that enables remote intellectual-property evaluation over the Internet. Based on the Simutech Reconfigurable Architecture Verification Engine (Rave), Evalab includes a software wrapper to help with IP evaluation over the Web. Quickturn's RPS is also based on the Rave system but has additional interfaces to simulators and Quickturn emulation systems.

CoreBoards with a variety of key components are expected to arrive that will help users of semiconductor intellectual property evaluate third-party IP and their own hardware and software, as well as verify complete system-on-chip designs.

"This probably won't be for people trying to evaluate the ARM core," David Stewart, vice president of European operations for Simutech, said of the ARM7TDMI-based board. "Very often, this will be for people who know they will use ARM but want to see how their own IP or software works in an ARM c ontext."

Stewart added that Simutech "expects and encourages companies to build their own CoreBoards. We're not purveyors of IP, but we do want to help customers bring their IP up quickly. It makes sense for this to be made available for our customers."

"There's also a key focus on platforms for software development," commented George Zafiropoulos, vice president of marketing at Quickturn. "What users say is that, rather than debug the logic, it allows them to start debugging software early, before they have a chip. You are really debugging software and the IP interfaces."

The ARM7TDMI CoreBoard is available for shipment from Quickturn priced at $10,500.