SIDSA announces the new "CARMeN-II" ARM emulation board for SoC Development &Validation

Fast, single board ARM SoC prototyping environment for hardware / software co-design

Tres Cantos, Spain, September 6st,2004 – SIDSA (Semiconductor Research and Development), a leading European provider of SoC design services and multimedia products, today announced a new ARM Design platform called “CARMeN-II”.  Based on SIDSA’s proven line of ARM emulation products, it allows fast prototyping of large ARM-based ASICs on a single Xilinx XC2V6000 or XC2V8000 with physical interfaces to many peripherals such as Ethernet, USB, PCMCIA, smarcard, PCI, UART, CAN

Overview
Although  ARM cores are today a widely used “de-facto” standard , development costs and time-to-market are considerable for custom ASICs or SoC (System on Chip) and new skills are required for hardware and embedded software design

Solutions
SIDSA’s seven years knowledge of ARM design is embodied into the “CARMeN-II” board.  This fourth generation product combines SIDSA’s and customers’ experience in SoC design.  Using the “CARMeN-II”, rather than relying on simulation only, ARM based designs can be quickly mapped into the emulation boards and debugged.    This methodology is ideal for software / hardware partitioning and co-design.  The embedded software can be fully verified in the target environment before and during IC tape-out.

As well as the on-board ARM7TDMI core, other cores and header cards are now available from SIDSA such as ARM720, ARM940/9TDMI, ARM920, ARM946.

When the decision is taken to product the ASIC, the same netlist can be given to a design house or foundry for the SoC place and route.  As the ARM core is available in most silicon foundries, the decision to choose the component supplier can be taken at the end of the development cycle.  

Availability and Pricing

Shipping, 1 to 2 weeks delivery time.
Prices, starting from 14k EUR (17.5k USD).