Summit Integrates Sugar with Visual Elite to Provide an Enhanced Assertion-Based Verification Flow

Summit Integrates Sugar with Visual Elite to Provide an Enhanced Assertion-Based Verification Flow

BURLINGTON, Mass.-May 21, 2003--Summit Design, Inc., the pioneer of electronic system-level (ESL) design solutions and methodologies, has announced a new assertion-based verification flow, based on the industry-standard PSL/Sugar language. The new flow combines Summit Design's Visual Elite and IBM's FoCs tool and is aimed at accelerating HDL and SystemC design and verification.

Assertion-based verification allows designers to define high-level functional rules (a.k.a. assertions or properties) that can be carried along the design process and to identify errors and missed coverage at multiple levels of abstraction.

Visual Elite is a C/C++ and SystemC functional modeling and verification environment that enables engineers to quickly capture and analyze complex hardware architectures and effectively map them to RTL implementation. FoCs takes Sugar assertions and transforms them to efficient assertion checking code, which can be integrated into the simulation environment. The combination of FoCs and Visual Elite provides for dynamic assertion checking which greatly improves verification effectiveness.

"We are pleased to see the growing adoption of Sugar across the industry", said Dr. Yaron Wolfsthal, Manager of Formal Methods at the IBM Haifa labs where Sugar and FoCs were conceived. "Summit Design has made assertion-based verification with Sugar available to users of Visual Elite. We are confident that this will significantly improve design productivity and verification quality for HDL and SystemC users."

"The integration between FoCs and Visual Elite will enable our users to leverage the assertion capabilities in their design flow in order to provide a better verification methodology", said Rami Rachamim, Director of Marketing at Summit Design "The assertion methodology is critical for advanced verification and we would like to see this methodology evolve into the system space through the support of languages like SystemC."

About Visual Elite

Visual Elite provides a comprehensive design and verification flow from high-level specifications, through to partitioning and verification. It provides a high performance, high-level C/C++ and SystemC functional and architectural modeling and verification environment that enables engineers to quickly capture and analyze system concepts and take it all the way down to HDL RTL implementation.

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, Israel, and the Far East. European Headquarters are located in Paris. For more information on Summit and its products, visit http://www.sd.com

For more information, contact:
Summit Design
Anat Zimmerman
+972-9-9708771
anatz@sd.com