Cadence halts sales of Cierto VCC co-design tool

Cadence halts sales of Cierto VCC co-design tool
By Michael Santarini, EE Times
March 25, 2002 (4:56 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020319S0025

SAN MATEO, Calif. — Cadence Design Systems Inc. has halted sales of Cierto Virtual Component Co-design, its hardware/software co-design tool, through its regular sales channels and plans to release a new version that's easier to use later this year.

The highly-touted product, introduced in January 2000, was said to allow designers to develop platform hardware and software at the system level, though was said to be difficult to use.

The concept for Cierto VCC came from Cadence Berkeley Labs, and the version of the tool that is no longer being sold was developed at Cadence. Its difficulty for users required Cadence to bundle services with seats of the tool.

Mike O'Reilly, director of marketing for System and Functional Verification at Cadence, said the company is going to revise the tool to make it more suitable to the mass market of design engineers, rather than a narrower aud ience of system architects.

O'Reilly said the company plans to make the tool's system-level modeling features easier to use for hardware designers, and will revise its driver development utilities for software designers.

Cadence will also allow the new version of the tool to run on up-and-coming system-level design languages, O'Reilly said, though he declined to say which ones. Open SystemC and Superlog are obvious candidates.

In the meantime, Cadence will sell extra seats of the current version of Cierto VCC to current users and will offer it through its services division, though not through its regular sales channels, O'Reilly said.

O'Reilly said the product has 20 customers and that Cadence has sold over 500 seats of the tool. Cierto VCC customers include Nokia, Ericsson, BMW, Motorola, Phillips and Texas Instruments.