Product category:
Design and Development Software
News Release from: Vast Systems Technology | Subject: Comet 5
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 22 June 2004
Systems engineering environment cuts out
respins
The Comet 5 system engineering environment (SEE) provides quantitative architectural design and evaluation, hardware refinement and verification, and software development.
The Comet 5 system engineering environment (SEE) provides quantitative architectural design and evaluation, hardware refinement and verification, and software development Using Comet 5, engineers can work together early in the system design process to evaluate architectural choices and their implications for both hardware and software development, thus avoiding chip respins and speeding development
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 1 Mar 2005 at 8.00am (UK)
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The latest release of Comet adds substantial new functionality to Vast's fifth generation of electronic system level (ESL) tools.
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Adopting a virtual-prototype-based SoC development process offers all-round benefits, and makes the hardware designer's job easier, argues Graham Hellestrand, founder of Vast Systems Technology.
Comet 5 includes two new tools, Virtual Prototype Constructor and Peripheral Builder, which enable semiconductor and systems engineers to create and modify their virtual prototypes without compromising the high performance and accuracy that Vast delivers.
Comet 5 also now includes the Communication Infrastructure Fabric (CIF), a foundation technology that extends the performance and accuracy of virtual prototypes from processors out to buses and peripheral devices.
Engineers can now accurately assess the effect of architectural choices at the system, software, and hardware levels.
Further reading
Paper looks at model-based development
A white paper available from Vast discusses today's automobiles which contain many complex electronic systems, each of which may incorporate a large number of electronic control units.
Software brings virtual prototyping to peripherals
Peripheral Device Builder (PDB) is the latest addition to the line of powerful virtual system prototyping tools from Vast Systems Technology Corp.
Tools get to grip with virtual processor models
Virtual Processor Model Transformer (VPM-T), phase 1, is the latest addition to the range of powerful virtual system prototyping tools from Vast Systems Technology Corp.
In addition, Comet 5 now supports System C, allowing existing peripheral models to run unchanged in the Comet 5 system engineering environment.
Vast's data streaming, analysis, and graphics charting tool, Metrix, also has been enhanced with new analytic and visualisation functionality that increases engineering productivity.
Comet 5 systems engineering environment is used to create virtual prototypes - software simulations of the real hardware - which are used to architect, build and simulate complex, multi-processor, multiplexed bus systems, SoCs and networked electronic control unit (ECU) designs.
Such ECU designs are used in wireless systems, consumer electronic devices and automotive electronics.
Architects use virtual prototypes to evaluate architectural options running real software loads; hardware designers use them to verify that hardware functionality meets market requirements as hardware is built; and software developers use them for pre-silicon software development and easier debugging post-silicon.
Working from the same virtual prototype ensures that all groups are co-ordinated and that each group's expectations are met early in the design cycle, keeping resource utilisation and expense down.
"Systems architects and semiconductor providers need to quantitatively evaluate exactly how changes to silicon will behave under real software loads", said Graham Hellestrand, Vast CEO.
"They need a new level of experimentation, and virtual prototyping gives it to them".
"By detecting potential problems long before final silicon, they can avoid the million-dollar expense of respinning a chip and missing a market opportunity".
"The benefits extend beyond the walls of one company: virtual prototypes enable a co-operative approach between silicon providers, systems providers and their customers that reduces costs for each and gets new products to market faster".
With the Comet 5 systems engineering environment, hardware designers and software developers are able to use virtual prototypes, specified and developed by their system architects, as behavioural executable specifications.
This virtual prototype is the "golden reference model" of the system under development, giving hardware designers a precise, executable model with which to iteratively refine the architecture into a detailed RTL design, ready for synthesis.
The virtual prototype, whether the golden reference or a partially refined RTL model, is always executable and testable, enabling a precise reporting of progress throughout the product development process.
Comet 5 allows extension of the virtual prototype to include on-chip and off-chip peripherals, giving software developers a consistent executable reference specification so they can avoid architectural surprises later in the development cycle.
The Vast simulation kernel now has native support for models that are written in System C, which is rapidly becoming one of the de facto peripheral device modelling languages.
These models can be tuned to take advantage of the speed and accuracy offered in Comet, via the CIF, or can be run as is with no changes.
One of the key advantages of virtual prototypes over hardware prototypes is the increased observability and controllability.
The result is higher quality, reliability and engineering productivity.
Complementing Comet 5, Vast also has enhanced Metrix, its visualisation tool.
For example, Metrix now has the ability to inject data back into a virtual prototype even during simulation.
This capability enables a test harness to interact with, control, diagnose and potentially correct an erroneous state and/or signal information arising in the model.
In addition to the new Metrix functionality, engineers will benefit from open interfaces for software development tools introduced in Comet 5.
Software engineers can use commercial, off-the-shelf software development environments to write embedded software applications with the virtual prototypes just as if they were working with hardware prototypes.
They can create, edit, compile, link and load target code, then execute and debug the resulting binary executable directly on the Vast virtual prototype.
Virtual Prototype Constructor, Peripheral Builder and CIF are packaged with the Comet 5 system engineering environment (SEE).
A typical configuration of Comet 5 SEE is $50,000 per year including Metrix and maintenance.
Meteor, Vast's software development environment, starts at $10,000 per year.
Both products are in customer use and will be generally available from 30th June 2004.
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