Carbon Adds Support for Fast Models from ARM

Delivers Near Real Time Simulation Performance on an Industry-Leading Virtual Platform

ACTON, MASS. -- October 21, 2009 -- Carbon Design Systems™, a leading supplier of tools for the automatic creation, validation and deployment of system-level models, today announced full support for Fast Models from ARM® in its SoC Designer™ virtual platform. This support will enable users to leverage a single virtual platform environment for every aspect of their development process. SoC Designer now enables users to easily perform tasks ranging from application software development to low-level firmware development and even architectural design.

The Fast Models product family from ARM includes programmer’s view (PV) models for the ARM9™, ARM11™ and Cortex™ families of processors, including the Cortex-A9 MPCore™ multicore processor. T he Fast Model products also include configuration tools that enable the export of ARM processor-based subsystems with OSCI SystemC and TLM-2.0 compliant interfaces.

Matches Abstraction Level to the Design Task

“ARM’s Fast Models execute at speeds of up to 250MHz,” stated Tom Rathje, vice president of Engineering at Carbon. “By integrating these models into SoC Designer, we’ve enabled our users to perform all of their development tasks in a single virtual platform.

Architects can use the cycle-accurate capabilities of SoC Designer and Carbon’s implementation-accurate ARM models to make key architectural decisions and optimize the throughput and power usage of their complex SoC designs. Firmware engineers can leverage the hardware/software debug capabilities of SoC Designer to quickly identify and fix their issues. Software developers can now use this same platform, together with the Fast Models from ARM to debug application level software. Carbon has enabled our users to swap and play any model in the system to seamlessly tradeoff accuracy and performance.”

About the Integration

The Fast Models from ARM are integrated into SoC Designer using OSCI TLM2.0. Other models in the system can be modeled using whatever level of abstraction desired by the user to meet their needs. An application developer can represent the system in high-level, loosely timed TLM2.0 models and create a completely functional system inside of SoC Designer, which executes nearly as fast as the real silicon but with far greater visibility.

If greater accuracy is desired, any of the components in the system can be easily swapped with more accurate models. These include approximately timed TLM2.0 models or even 100% implementation-accurate models compiled from the actual design register transfer level (RTL) by Carbon Model Studio. The combination of the advanced capabilities of SoC Designer, the speed of the Fast Models and the accuracy of the Carbon library of implementation-accurate ARM models delivers users a complete solution for modeling ARM technology-based SoC designs.

“We are seeing an increasing demand for high performance models in the industry,” said Mark Onions, director of marketing, System Design Division, ARM. “The integration of the Fast Models portfolio with SoC Designer enables our customers to choose the most suitable model for each stage of their development all within the same development environment.”

Availability

SoC Designer with support for Fast Models is available now to select customers and will be generally available in the first quarter of 2010. Fast Models integrated with SoC Designer will be demonstrated today and tomorrow, October 21-22, at ARM® Techcon3 (Booth #710) at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, Calif.

About Carbon Design Systems

Carbon Design Systems offers a leading system validation solution for complex systemon- chip (SoC) designs. Target applications range from model generation and deployment to virtual platform creation, execution, and analysis. Carbon provides 100% implementation accuracy on the critical components required for accurate architectural analysis and pre-silicon hardware/software validation. Solutions are based on open industry standards, including SystemC, IP-XACT, Verilog, VHDL, OSCI TLM, MDI, SCML, CASI, CADI and CAPI. Carbon’s customers are systems, semiconductor, and IP companies that focus on wireless, networking, and consumer electronics. Carbon is headquartered at 125 Nagog Park, Acton, Mass., 01720. Telephone: (978) 264-7300. Facsimile: (978) 264-9990. Website: www.carbondesignsystems.com.