Carbon Breaks Down ESL Adoption Barriers; SOC-VSP(TM) and ARM RealView(R) SoC Designer Provide the Fastest Path for SoC Development(TM).

WALTHAM, Mass. -- Carbon Design Systems, a leader in virtual system prototyping, rolled-out its breakthrough SOC-VSP product line that complements the power of ARM(R) RealView(R) SoC Designer solution by importing Verilog and/or VHDL (RTL) into a RealView SoC development environment. This combination allows a hardware-accurate SoC model with RTL to be profiled, optimized, debugged, and validated including the software and hardware content. System architects, software developers, and hardware designers can validate design assumptions and implementation throughout the design cycle.

System architects can profile a SoC with cycle-count accuracy and certified models to find software bottlenecks and discover optimal hardware configurations. Software developers can get an early jump on debugging their firmware on a hardware-accurate model -- rather than waiting months for silicon or a behavioral model to be developed. Hardware designers can leverage fast mixed-level simulation, an integrated debugger, and a plug-and-play interface to an AMBA(R) AHB(TM) interconnect, AMBA APB(TM) interconnect, or AMBA 3 AXI(TM) interconnect. This is the first all-software, all-inclusive product of its kind to enable Continuous Validation(TM) of software and hardware from concept to volume production.

"This end-to-end integration will enable our customers to use the RealView SoC Designer with both existing and newly developed RTL early in the design cycle to make informed design trade-offs and carry out inclusive software and hardware validation," explained Chris Lennard, ESL Technical Marketing Manager, ARM. "Transparent support of both Verilog and VHDL hardware descriptions, like the support provided by Carbon's SOC-VSP solution, is critical for today's complex SoC designs that have IP incorporated from multiple sources."

"The ESL adoption barrier has finally been broken with the advent of SOC-VSP", said Steve Butler, President and CEO of Carbon Design Systems. "Waiting for behavioral models of the RTL to be developed is a thing of the past. This SoC development tool suite is design language agnostic and lets users easily mix and match C, SystemC, Verilog, and VHDL."

Compiled RTL can now become an integral part of the RealView SoC Designer's system partitioning, profiling, debugging, and simulation. SOC-VSP's component wizard enables Verilog and/or VHDL to be easily incorporated into the design environment of the RealView SoC Designer. Bus protocols are selected; clock, interrupt, and reset signals are defined; RTL is compiled; and a component is automatically added to the ARM RealView Model Library. These model components can be easily "dragged and dropped" onto its design canvas along with processors and peripheral models. Components are easily connected to an AMBA interconnect by simply drawing lines and assigning bus attributes. Once the architecture is defined, embedded software can be executed on the underlying hardware and both the software and the hardware can be profiled together.

All standard debugging features are supported -- single-stepping of source code; setting breakpoints; tracing registers, memories, and signals -- with "Carbonized" RTL hardware models. RealView SoC Designer's waveform viewer is transaction-aware and animates both transactions and signals. Now, Verilog and VHDL models can be interrogated as standard components. SOC-VSP supports 100% visibility for all RTL signals, registers, and memories.

Carbon and ARM have created an industry first by providing save and restore for a complete SoC modeling environment that includes Verilog and VHDL. Firmware and the underlying hardware can be validated and check-pointed at any time. Typically, once a bug is discovered and fixed, perhaps days into a simulation, the simulation would need to be repeated to verify the "fix". With SOC-VSP, the simulation state can be saved and restored, to jump days into the simulation and validate the bug fix. This feature not only allows quick verification of bug fixes, but enables much longer simulations by not rerunning previously validated code. With the growth in software content in SoC design and overall hardware complexity, save and restore is a requirement for a robust SoC development environment.

Pricing and Availability

Carbon's SOC-VSP software product will be shipping December 30, 2005 with per seat pricing based on an annual subscription volume model.

About Carbon

Carbon is delivering a high-performance virtual system prototyping solution that enables a SoC prototype to be rapidly assembled and functionally validated on an engineer's desktop months before silicon. Carbon's new software approach allows multiple levels of abstraction to be validated together including processors, peripherals, C, SystemC, Verilog, VHDL, IP cores, and transaction-level models. The key to SOC-VSP is silicon accuracy and performance -- the ability to execute billions of cycles and boot embedded operating systems, all with desktop software. Problems can be found and resolved during the design cycle -- rather than waiting for idealized behavioral models to be developed or first silicon to be delivered.

The company is headquartered at 375 Totten Pond Road, Suite 100/200, Waltham, MA. 02451. Telephone: [phone], Fax: [phone], Email: [e-mail],

Website: www.carbondesignsystems.com

Carbon Design Systems, VSP, SOC-VSP, The Fastest Path for SoC Development, and Continuous Validation are trademarks of Carbon Design Systems, Incorporated.

ARM, AMBA and RealView are registered trademarks of ARM Limited. AHB, APB and AXI are trademarks of ARM Limited. "ARM" is used to represent ARM Holdings plc; its operating company ARM Limited; and the regional subsidiaries ARM INC.; ARM KK; ARM Korea Ltd.; ARM Taiwan; ARM France SAS; ARM Consulting (Shanghai) Co. Ltd.; ARM Belgium N.V.; AXYS Design Automation Inc.; AXYS GmbH; ARM Embedded Technologies Pvt. Ltd.; and ARM Physical IP, Inc.

All other companies and products referenced herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.