Alta Group Announces Envision Multimedia Design System; New System Leverages SPW and CONVERGENCE Simulation Architecture.SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 29, 1996--The Alta Group of Cadence Design Systems (company) Cadence Design Systems - A company that sells electronic design automation software and services. http://cadence.com/. See also Verilog. today announced the ENVISION Multimedia Design System, the first in a new series of design systems aimed at convergence applications. The ENVISION Multimedia Design System enables multimedia system designers to define, verify and optimize system functionality at high levels of abstraction (behavioral level) quickly and with reliable results. Once complex multimedia designs are verified with the ENVISION Multimedia Design System, designers can then use Alta Group's Hardware Design System (HDS (Hitachi Data Systems, Santa Clara, CA, www.hds.com) A leading provider of high-end storage hardware, software and services. Part of the Information Systems & Telecommunications Division of Hitachi Ltd. ) to refine the design into RTL (Register Transfer Level) A high-level hardware description language (HDL) for defining digital circuits. The circuits are described as a collection of registers, Boolean equations, control logic such as "if-then-else" statements as well as complex event sequences; implementations. The new ENVISION Multimedia Design System has been developed to specifically address today's critical multimedia design challenges, such as set-top boxes The cable TV box that sits on "top" of the TV "set," although it is often located several feet away in an equipment rack. The set-top box descrambles the premium channels and provides a tuner for the higher cable numbers that very old TVs did not support. for digital video, color copiers, document imaging and processing and videoconferencing A real time video session between two or more users or between two or more locations. Although the first videoconferencing was done with traditional analog TV and satellites, inhouse room systems became popular in the early 1980s after Compression Labs pioneered digitized video systems as well as general image processing image processing Set of computational techniques for analyzing, enhancing, compressing, and reconstructing images. Its main components are importing, in which an image is captured through scanning or digital photography; analysis and manipulation of the image, accomplished design. Complex multimedia designs, such as this, require focused design systems that include graphical model In probability theory, statistics, and machine learning, a graphical model (GM) is a graph that represents independencies among random variables by a graph in which each node is a random variable, and the missing edges between the nodes represent conditional independencies. building, pre-built libraries and interactive visualization Interactive visualization is a branch of graphic visualization in computer science that studies how humans interact with computers to create graphic illustrations of information and how this process can be made more efficient. and analysis tools so that users can manage the complexity of these sophisticated, data-intensive designs. "In the past, Alta Group has offered a base product that many customers have applied to multimedia applications," said Doug Fairbairn, vice president and general manager, Alta Group. "The ENVISION Multimedia Design System represents significant advancements in technology and offers many industry firsts, which will allow customers to quickly and efficiently complete their next-generation multimedia designs. As the first in a new series of design systems, we believe the ENVISION Multimedia Design System, with its feature-rich analysis tools and customized libraries, will set the standard for system-level design solutions aimed at any complex, data-intensive applications." The ENVISION Multimedia Design System is the first EDA (1) (Electronic Design Automation) Using the computer to design, lay out, verify and simulate the performance of electronic circuits on a chip or printed circuit board. environment specifically tailored to system-level multimedia product design and offers the following new technology: -0- - Graphical object-oriented modeling Object-Oriented Modeling, or OOM, is a modeling paradigm mainly used in computer programming. Prior to the rise of OOM, the dominant paradigm was functional programming, which emphasised the use of discreet reusable code blocks that could stand on their own, take variables, perform based on multimedia data types - Memory management for large data objects - Interactive image analysis tools integrated with the simulation environment - Pre-built professional libraries of image-processing function blocks - Extensive class libraries and block creation tools for user-defined functions -0- In addition to the new features optimized for complex multimedia design, the ENVISION Multimedia Design System takes advantage of Alta Group's SPW SPW Signal Processing Workstation SPW Shelter in Place Warning SPW Spencer, IA, USA - Spencer Municipal Airport (Airport Code) SPW Special Purpose Weapon SPW Spokane Washington (border patrol sector) and HDS systems, which traditionally have focused on wireless, communications and multimedia applications. Leveraging the core CONVERGENCE Simulation Architecture recently announced by Alta Group, the ENVISION Multimedia Design System provides designers with a full-system, mixed-level and mixed-domain simulation environment, enabling continuous analysis and verification of the increasingly complex multimedia designs from concept to implementation. The graphical modeling environment and ability to add customer models also makes the ENVISION Multimedia Design System an ideal environment for creating and re-using intellectual property. Key to the new ENVISION Multimedia Design System is an object-oriented simulation environment tailored for multimedia system modeling. Additionally, pre-built libraries of image and video processing Video processing techniques are used in video codecs, video players and other devices. For example—commonly only design and video processing is different in TV sets of different manufactures. functions give designers a head start in system modeling, using elements such as 2D filters, edge detectors and transforms, all critical in today's multimedia applications. The ENVISION Multimedia Design System also features an interactive visual analysis tool, integrated within the simulation environment, that speeds the creation and analysis of test images and videos. Traditionally, designers of multimedia systems have hand-coded designs at this level using C or C++ models or used general purpose analytical math software and then converted those into synthesizable HDL (Hardware Description Language) A language used to describe the functions of an electronic circuit for documentation, simulation or logic synthesis (or all three). Although many proprietary HDLs have been developed, Verilog and VHDL are the major standards. code. With hand coding Writing in a programming language. Hand coding in assembly language or in a third-generation language, such as C or Java, is the traditional way programs have been developed. In contrast, visual programming tools allow full applications or parts of an application to be developed without , users have been unable to leverage their designs and re-use intellectual property. Unlike a general purpose tool, which has a slow execution speed -- especially on sequences of images -- the ENVISION Multimedia Design System offers designers significantly faster results due to its powerful simulator and compiled processing functions. Moreover, general purpose analysis tools are incapable of complex data management, while the ENVISION Multimedia Design System keeps track of higher order information like sub-images, color maps and image sequences. The Convergence Paradigm The convergence of system-level design and chip-level design and the convergence of communications and multimedia are generating a new class of systems-on-a-chip and complex boards that merge these various "convergence" functions, each of which requires multiple, interacting modeling paradigms. An example of such a system is a set-top box, which merges wired communications functions, wireless communications wireless communications System using radio-frequency, infrared, microwave, or other types of electromagnetic or acoustic waves in place of wires, cables, or fibre optics to transmit signals or data. functions and multimedia processing. These types of consumer-oriented convergence applications are merging data, speech, image processing and control functions, which are implemented with a combination of hardware and software on very complex chips. The ENVISION Multimedia Design System is the first in a series of systems from Alta Group aimed at convergence applications with additional announcements to be made in 1996. Pricing and Availability The ENVISION Multimedia Design System operates on Sun Sparc (Sun OS and Solaris) and Hewlett-Packard workstations and will be available in Q196 at $58,000 per seat. SPW customers may upgrade their system to the ENVISION Multimedia Design System for $20,000 per seat. Alta Group is the leading supplier of system-level software tools, libraries and services for the design of electronic systems. The company's products are focused on the early, high-level portion of the design cycle where fundamental design decisions are made. Products of this type are classified as electronic system design automation (ESDA ESDA exploratory spatial data analysis ESDA Electrostatic Discharge Association ESDA Emergency Services & Disaster Agency (Civil Defense) ESDA Electrostatic Detection Apparatus ). Alta Group's target customers include electronic systems and semiconductor companies that design wireless communications, multimedia, networking and related products. -0- NOTE TO EDITORS: Alta Group, SPW, HDS, CONVERGENCE and ENVISION are trademarks of Alta Group. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. CONTACT: Tsantes & Associates Diane Orr, 408/452-8700 diane@tsantes.com |
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