DSP design software gains multimedia library

iDeaWorks is providing IP reference models integrated into CoWare Signal Processing Designer.

CoWare and iDeaWorks Technologies have signed a multi-year OEM agreement in which iDeaWorks delivers CoWare IP reference models integrated into CoWare Signal Processing Designer (formerly known as SPW).

"As platform-driven design becomes the mantra in our industry, we are looking to provide more and more platform components in a ready-to-use fashion to accelerate the platform design process for our customers", said AK Kalekos, Vice President Marketing and Business Development, CoWare.

"We are glad to augment our own wireless standards reference models with expertise in multimedia standards such as H.264 coming from the iDeaWorks designers".

"CoWare ESL solutions lead the way by addressing the needs of SoC design teams for convergence applications", said Robert Barker, Vice President Business Development, iDeaWorks.

"Our go-to-market strategy in the IP space leverages CoWare's strong technology presence in major system and semiconductor companies around the globe".

Today, designers are facing a significant challenge for design and verification of new applications such as H.264.

If they have not been involved in the actual standardisation work, it is very difficult to understand and implement starting with 35,000 lines of H.264 reference source code, which they can download from the standards committee website.

Implementation teams concerned with hardware and software partitioning and detailed design typically think in block diagrams of larger subfunctions.

Each of those subfunctions may have specific system-level parameters (such as the picture size) or lower-level parameters for the implementation, which need to be managed in a transparent way.

Finally, the designers need to execute the entire system effectively with no loss in simulation efficiency compared with the reference source code.

CoWare Signal Processing Designer provides the data flow modelling, parameterisation, and simulation capabilities for very complex signal processing applications.

When design teams decide how to capture their IP, they are making a very long-term commitment.

As an example, typical 2G algorithmic models that have been developed 15 or more years ago are still being used today as a golden, functional reference.

For future advanced wireless systems and their underlying different user applications, such as multimedia, the design community is facing the same decision criteria for 2G, and they also need to be prepared to re-use the captured models with a much larger variety of different multiprocessor platforms.

With H.264, HSDPA, and other reference models, CoWare adds to the designer's own modelling effort a significant number of off-the-shelf, standards-based models, which the designer can leverage to speed up the design process.

CoWare Signal Processing Designer is delivering the core tool strengths for successful algorithm design and is embedded into the entire CoWare Platform-driven ESL design solution.

CoWare Signal Processing Designer H.264 Libraries are available today.

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