Two New CoWare Products Provide Increased Productivity for Cross-Functional SoC Design Teams

New Products Serve Distinctive Needs of SoC System Architects And System Verifiers

SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 21 /PRNewswire/ -- CoWare(TM), Inc., the market leader in system-level Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools, today introduced two new products, the CoWare N2C System Designer and the CoWare N2C Advanced System Designer. These two products address the diverse tool needs of cross-functional SoC (system-on-chip) design teams. CoWare N2C System Designer helps system integrators, firmware developers and verification engineers integrate hardware and software much earlier in the SoC design process. The CoWare N2C Advanced System Designer adds the recently announced complex bus analysis and synthesis capabilities, giving system architects the most capable platform creation tool set in the industry.

"We've created two significant new products in the CoWare N2C family in direct response to the needs our rapidly-growing customer base," stated Alan Naumann, President and CEO, CoWare, Inc. "In our flagship CoWare N2C Advanced System Designer, we have set the bar even higher for interconnect automation and architectural exploration, for system architects and SoC implementers. Meanwhile, in CoWare N2C System Designer, we have created the leading multi-level co-simulation solution for verification of multiprocessor SoC designs in C, SystemC or HDL languages."

CoWare N2C System Designer - Driving System Integration Earlier and Faster

CoWare N2C System Designer allows system verifiers and firmware developers to integrate hardware and software earlier in the SoC design process. This new product leverages and extends CoWare N2C's existing capabilities to provide C or SystemC-based multi-processor hardware-software co-simulation. Speed improvements of between 1 and 4 orders of magnitude, compared with HDL-based hardware-software co-verification, are possible using multiple levels of abstraction in C or SystemC, combined with the ability to remove simulation bottlenecks by either moving the HDL/C boundary, or eliminating it altogether. Untimed, timed functional and cycle-accurate behavioral abstractions can be mixed at will with transactional, bus cycle-accurate or pin-accurate communications abstractions. The HDL/C bottleneck can be optimized away or removed by moving legacy synthesizable VHDL or Verilog to C or SystemC using the HDL Import product option.

Three Significant New Capabilities

Three significant new capabilities are introduced with CoWare N2C System Designer to ease adoption by HDL-based hardware teams, to provide a richer development environment for software developers, and to allow system integration on the latest generation of complex bus-based SoC platforms. Firstly, CoWare has optimized the ability to co-simulate SoC software with HDL-based hardware 'out of the box'. Even without moving any HDL blocks to C or SystemC, market-leading hardware-software co-simulation performance can be obtained. This allows for a much easier adoption of CoWare's C or SystemC- based methodology, since immediate benefits can be realized in HDL-based design flows as a stepping-stone to the much larger benefits of system-level design.

Secondly, new analysis tools have been added for the software developer. These include task-level Gantt, task-level CPU load, memory and cache analysis tools. In combination with the chosen processor vendor's tool chain integrated into a CoWare aWare(TM) Processor Support Package, these analysis tools provide a familiar environment for the software developer that eliminate the need to understand the HDL simulator, or worse, to debug hardware-dependent software using a waveform viewer.

Finally, CoWare N2C System Designer includes the ability to build, execute and analyze software running on platforms, created using CoWare N2C Advanced System Designer, which utilize the new generation of complex multi-layer buses such as AMBA 2.0.

CoWare N2C Advanced System Designer

The CoWare N2C Advanced System Designer, also introduced today, adds the full suite of CoWare's implementation tools on top of the System Designer product, and introduces new complex bus analysis capabilities as well as the recently announced second generation Interface Synthesis(TM). This gives SoC system architects the most capable platform creation tool available in the industry today.

Using CoWare N2C Advanced System Designer, system architects have a full set of tools to solve one of the most difficult problems in today's designs -- finding the bus architecture that gives the best tradeoff of high performance and low power. Advanced System Designer provides the tools and methodology to model, synthesize and evaluate different bus architectures quickly. CoWare's new second-generation Interface Synthesis technology automatically synthesizes the bus interconnect matrixes and crossbar switches, which are at the heart of multi-layer buses including ARM's AMBA® 2.0 on- chip interconnect and STMicroelectronic's STBus. The necessary arbitration logic for multiple bus masters, along with all other bus logic, also is synthesized. As a result, the SoC platform architecture is fully validated before proceeding to implementation, ensuring the right SoC design is built right the first time.

"As more designers take advantage of the flexibility and ease of implementation that AMBA technology offers, they need to be able to explore the wide range of design possibilities open to them," stated Jonathan Morris, ARM's System Infrastructure Program Manager. "Now, with CoWare N2C Advanced System Designer, our mutual customers can efficiently test different AMBA technology-based architectures to find the optimal trade-off of performance and power for their latest portable consumer devices."

About the CoWare N2C Design System

The CoWare N2C Design system is a family of products that collectively make up the industry's most comprehensive set of tools for designing SoCs and flexible platforms at the system level using C or SystemC. The CoWare N2C Design System fully supports SystemC version 2.0, including the master-slave communications library. Family members include:

    -- CoWare N2C Advanced System Designer -- a complete system-level design
       solution for system architects and hardware implementers.
    -- CoWare N2C System Designer -- a complete hardware/software
       co-simulation solution for systems integrators, software developers and
       verification engineers.
    -- CoWare N2C HDL Import (separately priced option to either Advanced
       System Designer or System Designer) -- allows legacy VHDL or Verilog to
       be migrated to C or SystemC for use in a system-level design flow.

The CoWare N2C family is supported by a wide range of CoWare aWare processor support packages, bus models and related silicon IP.

Availability

Both new CoWare N2C products are available now. Contact your local sales office for a demonstration (see www.CoWare.com/offices for a complete office listing).

About CoWare

As the leading supplier of tools for system-level electronic design automation (EDA), CoWare, Inc. provides a platform-based design methodology that can cut system-on-a-chip (SoC) design time in half. As a founder and leader of SystemC, CoWare is driving the industry towards a unifying system design language. The CoWare software is employed by major systems, IP and semiconductor companies including Alcatel, ARM, Canon, Fujitsu, InterDigital, Matsushita, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sanyo, Sony, STMicroelectronics, Tensilica and Toshiba. CoWare was recognized as the 5th fastest-growing private company in Silicon Valley in 2000(1). For more information, visit www.CoWare.com.

NOTE: CoWare, CoWare N2C, CoWare aWare and Interface Synthesis are trademarks of CoWare, Inc.

ARM and AMBA are registered trademarks of ARM Ltd.