Summit Design Launches Visual Elite 4.0 to Ensure Continuous Methodology from Specification to HW/SW Implementation
Visual ESC Enables Hardware/Software Co-Design with Processor
ISS Models from Xilinx, ARM and Motorola
BURLINGTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 19, 2003--
Summit Design, Inc., the world leader in electronic system-level
(ESL) design solutions and methodologies, today announced the
availability of Visual Elite 4.0, the newest evolution of Summit's ESL
product line. The major enhancements are Visual Elite Embedded System
Co-design (ESC), a SystemC solution for target processors; SystemC
fast simulation and coding style utilizing FastC, a native SystemC
text environment, as well as highly advanced verification and
debugging mechanisms.
"Visual Elite 4.0 is a major advance in our system-level design
solution strategy," said Guy Moshe, President and CEO of Summit
Design. "Our SystemC and C/C++ technologies and expertise have grown
our development environment from a standard SystemC flow into a more
powerful system design solution, with many of the needed components
that are essential for our customers in a real system (HW/SW) design
flow. We offer not only language support, but also a real tool-set
that can serve multiple design paradigms, and multiple verification
domains."
Visual ESC offers high-level functional and architectural design
analysis and exploration in the context of target architectures, such
as the Xilinx Virtex-II Pro, ARM and Motorola, while leveraging the
performance and abstraction provided by SystemC.
"Maximizing the capability of the embedded PowerPC processors in
our Virtex-II Pro family can enable customers to achieve the lowest
overall system cost," said Jerry Banks, Director of Global Alliances
at Xilinx. "Visual Elite ESC is one of the first to offer a system
design flow based on high level functional and architectural models
which will greatly help in shortening overall development times."
Summit Design has an aggressive roadmap for providing additional
necessary SystemC technologies, such as coding style utilizing FastC
technology and C2HDL. The company is aiming at the full range of
verification through coverage and assertion solutions.
About Visual Elite 4.0
Visual Elite 4.0 includes major enhancements for SystemC and HDL.
Visual now offers a native SystemC environment with full support to a
pure SystemC text design.
Many debugging and verification enhancements have been added while
integrating them tightly with the emacs text editor. This includes
interactive tracing and monitoring objects in the editor fully
synchronized with timing execution. In addition, FastC performance has
been improved while supporting more SystemC constructs to allow test
bench modeling and translation to HDL.
About Visual ESC
Visual Elite ESC is a major part of Visual Elite 4.0. It provides
a SystemC-based platform with embedded ISS processors utilizing
transaction-level communication for HW/SW co-design. It offers a true
scalable mixed language environment, which establishes a powerful
integrated tool set for hardware and software teams. Instruction set
simulators are currently available for the Xilinx Virtex-II Pro, for
the ARM CCM Family, and for Motorola MPC7410 and MPC7450 PPC
processors. Features include complete visibility and debug of hardware
and software. Users can single-step through the software code and view
all processor registers and memories. The models and tools provide a
detailed time-stamped software trace, with mixed assembly and source
code debugging. Hardware is debugged simultaneously with software
execution. Users can set breakpoints, single-step through functional
execution, view waveforms, display variables, and trace all data
transactions with the software. Visual ESC also supports Virtual
Prototyping of the system hardware, thereby offering a
high-performance low-cost solution for software development. The
unified SystemC/HDL advanced debugging; along with the fully
integrated ISS, provide a powerful platform that span through system
specification, hardware implementation and software execution.
Pricing and availability
Visual Elite 4.0 is available now for beta, with prices beginning
at $15K U.S.
About Xilinx
Xilinx, Inc. (Nasdaq:XLNX) is the worldwide leader of programmable
logic and programmable system solutions. Additional information about
Xilinx is available at www.xilinx.com.
About Summit Design
Summit Design is a leading international supplier of software
products addressing engineering challenges met during the
specification and implementation design phases of complex
hardware/software systems. The world's top electronics companies use
Summit Design's products to increase engineering productivity, shorten
time to market, and improve product quality. Summit Design is
headquartered in Burlington, Mass. with offices in Europe, Japan,
Israel, and ROA. For more information on Summit and its products,
visit http://www.sd.com.
Visual Elite is a trademark of Summit Design, Inc.
All other trademarks or registered trademarks are property of
their respective owners.
CONTACT: Summit Design
Anat Zimmerman, +972.9.9708771
anatz@sd.com
or
ThinkBold Corporate Communications, LLC
Francine Bacchini, 408/267-6602
francine@thinkbold.com
