Carbon's Virtual Hardware Models Plug-and-Play With CoWare Platform Architect

SystemC Modeling Library Enables Detailed Design Profiling and Visibility

WALTHAM, MA--Mar 1, 2007 -- Carbon Design Systems -- the leading supplier of electronic system-level (ESL) tools for the automatic creation, validation, and deployment of virtual hardware models -- announced today that its models are now plug-and-play with the Platform Architect design environment from CoWare®, the leading supplier of platform-driven ESL design software and services. Carbon SOC-VSP(TM) software creates cycle-accurate models that provide 100% visibility for profiling and design debugging. These models support a programmer friendly view of the hardware for system validation and have transaction-level interfaces for high-speed execution.

Carbon SOC-VSP software compiles Verilog and/or VHDL hardware descriptions into Platform Architect

drag-and-drop components. The openly available SystemC Modeling Library (SCML) was used to integrate Carbon's models into CoWare's heterogeneous simulation environment and provide full model visibility to the Platform Architect suite of analysis and debugging tools. Architectural exploration and firmware validation with cycle-accurate models is vital for analyzing performance, contention, latency, pipeline bottlenecks, and selecting software/hardware boundaries.

"SoC platform developers and system designers can derive even greater benefits from CoWare's ESL design solutions by using the new transaction-level flow with Carbon SOC-VSP," said A.K. Kalekos, vice president of marketing and business development at CoWare. "Better product decisions can be made sooner in the development cycle, and with reduced modeling effort. CoWare is pleased to support this new flow and the increased interoperability it provides our mutual customers."

"Companies standardizing on a SoC methodology require a return-on-investment from their warehouse of new and existing RTL. Automatically generating ESL models from RTL provides this return," emphasized Alan Swahn, vice president of marketing and business development at Carbon. "The advent of SCML has allowed Carbon to tightly meld our model generation with CoWare's robust ESL environment."

About the Integration

Carbon SOC-VSP software empowers users to create and validate reusable hardware models for CoWare Platform Architect that can be deployed throughout their enterprise. These models can represent IP blocks or a whole chip. Together, the joint flow enables designers to perform the detailed analysis necessary to understand how a system's software and hardware really interact.

Every architectural decision -- processor, third party IP, cache organization, bus configuration, memory subsystem, and I/O -- creates tradeoffs that are difficult to analyze without models that have hardware accuracy and an environment that supports the analysis of software-hardware interactions. Carbon's hardware accurate models can be profiled within Platform Architect, showing precisely how a design's architecture will perform. Model profile configurations can be saved and modified without recompiling the model. In this way, architectural exploration can efficiently include different use scenarios and design views.

Carbon's models have distinct advantages over debugging with physical hardware. With the SOC-VSP wizard, a "programmer friendly" view of the hardware can be quickly assembled by selecting and ordering signals, registers, ports, and memories. During software execution, the programmer has this familiar view for efficient profiling and debugging. In addition, breakpoints, watchpoints, monitors, and traces can be set on internal hardware points to provide the necessary detail to debug complex software-hardware interactions.

Platform Architect is used collaboratively across the design team. If a software engineer finds a perceived hardware problem while validating software on the Carbon model, the hardware engineer will see the same problem with full visibility and debug capabilities, including waveform viewing. This ensures that software validated on Carbon models will run on first silicon and that the system's performance matches expectations.

Availability

Carbon SOC-VSP software with virtual hardware model generation for CoWare Platform Architect is now released. Call Carbon for product evaluations and pricing. Platform Architect is available from CoWare today.

About Carbon Design Systems

Carbon is the leading supplier of ESL tools to automatically create, validate, and deploy virtual hardware models generated from Verilog and/or VHDL descriptions. Carbon's models are used in conjunction with SystemC simulation platforms to enable architecture profiling and software validation in parallel with hardware development. Problems can be found and resolved early in the design cycle, rather than waiting for prototypes to be built or silicon to be delivered.

The company's solutions are based on open industry standards, including: SystemC, SCML, Verilog, VHDL, OSCI TLM, CASI, CADI, and CAPI. Carbon's customers are systems, semiconductor, and IP companies that focus on communications, networking, and consumer electronics. The company is headquartered at 375 Totten Pond Road, Waltham, MA. 02451. Telephone: 781.890.1500, Fax: 781.890.1711, Email: info@carbondesignsystems.com, Websites: www.carbondesignsystems.com and www.easypass2esl.com