CoWare and Carbon Design Systems Team to Accelerate Availability of Virtual Hardware Platforms for Architecture Design and Software Development.

CoWare OEMs Carbon Model Studio for CoWare Platform Architect Giving Customers Easy Access to Both Technologies

SAN JOSE, Calif. & WALTHAM, Mass. -- CoWare([R]), Inc., the leading supplier of platform-driven electronic system-level (ESL) design software and services, and Carbon Design Systems([TM]), the leading supplier of tools for the automatic creation, validation and deployment of virtual hardware models, today announced the expansion of their strategic relationship focused on accelerating availability of virtual hardware platforms for architecture design and software development. Through an OEM agreement, CoWare will directly sell and support Carbon Model Studio for use with CoWare Platform Architect, streamlining access to the tools and delivery of platform modeling services.

"The combination of CoWare Platform Architect and Carbon Model Studio adds a new and exciting dimension to CoWare's ESL design solutions for architecture design and software development," said Alan Naumann, president and CEO at CoWare. "Together, we enable design teams to more easily leverage existing register transfer level (RTL) intellectual property (IP) to create virtual hardware platforms sooner in the design cycle, while maintaining the accuracy of the platform through to system debug. CoWare is very pleased to partner with Carbon to provide our customers with this valuable capability."

"By extending our relationship, we are providing a practical solution that removes barriers to model availability and accuracy by increasing RTL reuse in a production-proven ESL design environment," stated Rick Lucier, president and CEO at Carbon. "System designers can focus on the modeling of new IP, while we help increase the overall return on investment for platform modeling. It's a great combination and we are looking forward to working with CoWare."

Unique Advantages of Joint Solution

Components generated by Carbon Model Studio plug directly into CoWare's standards-based SystemC environment and can be distributed to software users worldwide. Carbon Model Studio's graphical user interface enables the user to create a Carbon model, configure its software-visible registers, and link with Platform Architect's transaction-based interfaces for reuse across multiple abstraction levels and interconnects.

Platform Architect components generated by Carbon Model Studio are integrated through CoWare's SystemC Modeling Library (SCML). This gives system architects and software engineers debug visibility into the Carbon Model, as all registers and memories in any model can be queried, modified, or used as breakpoints. Carbon Models are completely hardware accurate and can generate waveforms for viewing in the CoWare environment. This enables software and hardware engineers to work together to debug complex system problems or any hardware problems uncovered by running software.

Availability and Pricing

Carbon Model Studio for Platform Architect and Carbon model development professional services are available immediately from CoWare. For pricing details, contact the CoWare sales office near you. For more information on CoWare and Carbon solutions, visit www.coware.com and www.carbondesignsystems.com.

About Carbon Design Systems

Carbon is the leading supplier of system-level tools to automatically create, validate, and deploy software models generated from Verilog and/or VHDL descriptions. Carbon's models are used in conjunction with SystemC simulation platforms to enable architecture profiling and software validation in parallel with hardware development. Problems can be found and resolved early in the design cycle, rather than waiting for prototypes to be built or silicon to be delivered. Its solutions are based on open industry standards, including SystemC, SCML, Verilog, VHDL, OSCI TLM, MDI, CASI, CADI and CAPI. Carbon's customers are systems, semiconductor, and IP companies that focus on communications, networking, and consumer electronics. Carbon is headquartered at 375 Totten Pond Road, Waltham, Mass., 02451. Telephone: [phone]. Facsimile: [phone]. Email: [e-mail]. Web site: www.carbondesignsystems.com.

About CoWare

CoWare is the leading supplier of platform-driven electronic system-level (ESL) design software and services. CoWare offers a comprehensive set of ESL tools that enable electronics companies to "differentiate by design" through the creation of system IP including embedded processors, on-chip buses, and DSP algorithms; the architecture of optimized SoC platforms; hardware/software co-design; and virtual platforms for device software development. The company's solutions are based on open industry standards including SystemC. CoWare's customers are major systems, semiconductor, and IP companies in the market where consumer electronics, computing, and communications converge. CoWare's corporate investors include ARM [(LSE: ARM); (NASDAQ: ARMHY)], Cadence Design Systems (NASDAQ: CDNS), STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM), and Sony Corporation (NYSE: SNE). CoWare is headquartered in San Jose, Calif., and has offices around the world. For more information about CoWare and its products and services, visit www.coware.com.

Carbon Design Systems is a trademark of Carbon Design Systems. CoWare is a registered trademark of CoWare, Inc. Carbon Design Systems and CoWare acknowledge trademarks or registered trademarks of other organizations for their respective products and services.