Summit Design Introduces New Advances in ESL and Delivers Native SystemC in Visual Elite 4.0 to Provide an Industry Leading Modeling, Verification and Performance Analysis platform

BURLINGTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 31, 2004--Summit Design, Inc., the world leader in electronic system-level (ESL) design solutions and methodologies, today announced it will introduce its latest Visual Elite(TM) ESL product at DAC 2004. The innovative Visual Elite ESL product line now features Advanced SystemC Modeling and Analysis offering a state-of-the-art front-end, along with complete native text support.

Until now, other tools have been oriented specifically to either hardware or C/C++. Summit Design is delivering the first tool that can bridge this gap and take full advantage of the language abstraction and power, freeing engineers to successfully use it in the context of their complex system chips. Visual Elite 4.0 is the very first product offering built-in SystemC-native constructs that accelerate modeling and verification, making it intuitive for hardware designers as well as to C/C++ coders. One of the primary barriers in the adoption of SystemC is that it is software-oriented for hardware designers, while lacking some of the hardware notations. Today, this is being addressed through the newest Visual Elite platform that allows users to employ the powerful language constructs through an intuitive front-end and powerful verification and analysis tools.

By supporting a complete native SystemC file structure, there is no need for importing or special instrumentation that are limiting the scope of the language that can be supported. Visual Elite users are free to utilize any existing designs with the Visual tool-set.

"Visual Elite 4.0 introduces a new generation in ESL that facilitates the adoption of system level modeling in general, and SystemC in specific. To best serve the demanding needs of our industry-leading customers, we have invested significant resources in adjusting our front-end and verification tool-set to a real system level tool that allows engineers to easily model complex systems while leveraging all the power of the C/C++ language, as well as full integration with HDL," said Rami Rachamin, director of marketing for Summit. "We believe this advanced system platform will dramatically reduce the adoption phase of ESL and ensure ROI."

Visual offers the first SystemC-centric platform with "viewing duality" into the code from a language and from a design perspective. Users can have a clear hardware-centric view of the design structure (module hierarchy and interfaces), side by side with a C/C++ view on the language structure (classes, etc.). Those browsers offer a lot of value in having a clear view over the dependencies of the design constructs, either hardware or software related, which is of great value when coding C/C++ and helps with the design process and identifying problems. All those view browsers, along with the text editor, are fully synchronized and active during modeling and simulation, providing engineers with powerful insight into the structure and the execution of the design.

The Advanced SystemC Modeling offers users Hierarchical Channel constructs with an Interface Pin, Binder Object, List and visualization of the inherited Interface classes. Also included is a SystemC oriented GUI to all C/C++ declarations and object types with special attribute wizards that organize these attributes, making it easy to define and maintain them.

System verification tools
Visual 4.0 offers new transaction level verification tools including a transaction view in waveform, hierarchical channels, and interface method calls. Also included are Threads switching monitors allowing the user to switch and monitor all threads in the waiting queue, Stack visualization and Watch windows, as well as "on text" object value feedbacks. Visual Elite also allows debugging during design Elaboration. To leverage transactions level communication and queues and optimize verification, users need to have the same high-level view in the waveform, therefore Visual allows higher abstraction views during verification that fit the abstraction level of the design itself.

The System Architect package now supports a unique visualization of tokens distribution in the graphical waveform (Data Flow Diagram), and offers a new set of generic models for bus, processors, etc, as well as a PCI bus and IEEE 1394 performance models. Visual's System Architect package offers a set of functions and classes written on top of SystemC that can be instrumented into SystemC functional code and trace and log "tokens" of data. Later on that can be analyzed and perform statistical analysis allowing users to quickly discern relevant performance statistics -- such as latency, bandwidth and resource utilization.

Visual Elite now supports graphical state machines and mapping of SystemC RTL to VHDL, utilizing Summit FastC(R) technology, which offers orders of magnitude in SystemC simulation performance. This ability allows Visual to offer users high performance simulation for RT-level SystemC. In this way, users can employ SystemC for actual design (not just modeling) with high performance simulation and a direct path to synthesis.

Pricing and availability
Visual Elite is priced starting from $15K and is available for Beta release.

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.

Contacts
Summit Design, Inc.
Anat Zimmerman, 972-9-9708771
anat@sd.com
or
ThinkBold Corporate Communications, LLC
Francine Bacchini, 408-267-6602
francine@thinkbold.com