Product category:
Design and Development Software
News Release from: CoWare | Subject: N2C System Designer and Advanced System Designer
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 22 May 2002
Tools integrate crossfunctional SoC
design teams
The CoWare N2C System Designer and Advanced System Designer address the diverse tool needs of crossfunctional SoC design teams.
The CoWare N2C System Designer and Advanced System Designer address the diverse tool needs of crossfunctional SoC 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
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 15 May 2008 at 8.00am (UK)
Related stories
Alliance creates link from Matlab to ESL
C models generated from Matlab can now be efficiently run inside CoWare Signal Processing Designer, increasing the simulation performance by more than 3x in typical cases.
Software eases ESL 2.0 transition
CoWare is the first company to deliver a comprehensive and integrated offering for the ESL 2.0 era.
The CoWare N2C Advanced System Designer adds the company's 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.
"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.
Further reading
Design software receives new support
Platform Architect components generated by Carbon Model Studio are integrated through CoWare's SystemC Modelling Library (SCML).
Model sets enable hardware verification
CoWare's platform-driven ESL design solution enables hardware verification, architecture exploration and software development on IBM PowerPC 440 and CoreConnect-based platforms.
Collaboration produces ESL design environment
The CoWare CORXpert Personalisation Kit for STMicroelectronics supports ST's engineers in the creation of application-specific custom processors.
Meanwhile, in CoWare N2C System Designer, we have created the leading multilevel cosimulation solution for verification of multiprocessor SoC designs in C, SystemC or HDL languages".
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 multiprocessor hardware-software cosimulation.
Speed improvements of between 1 and 4 orders of magnitude, compared with HDL-based hardware-software coverification, 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 behavioural abstractions can be mixed at will with transactional, bus cycle-accurate or pin-accurate communications abstractions.
The HDL/C bottleneck can be optimised away or removed by moving legacy synthesisable VHDL or Verilog to C or SystemC using the HDL Import product option.
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.
First, CoWare has optimised the ability to cosimulate SoC software with HDL-based hardware 'out of the box'.
Even without moving any HDL blocks to C or SystemC, market-leading hardware-software cosimulation performance can be obtained.
This allows for a much easier adoption of CoWare's C or SystemC-based methodology, since immediate benefits can be realised 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 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 analyse software running on platforms, created using CoWare N2C Advanced System Designer, which use the new generation of complex multilayer buses such as AMBA 2.0.
The CoWare N2C Advanced System Designer 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.
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, synthesise and evaluate different bus architectures quickly.
CoWare's new second-generation Interface Synthesis technology automatically synthesises the bus interconnect matrixes and crossbar switches, which are at the heart of multilayer 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 synthesised.
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".
Both new CoWare N2C products are available now.
• CoWare: contact details and other news
• Email this article to a colleague
• Register for the free Electronicstalk email newsletter
• Electronicstalk Home Page
Search the Pro-Talk network of sites
