Enhanced Carbon Model Studio Reduces Time to Create Models
Portable Design News, Thursday June 05, 2008
Carbon Design Systems has released an enhanced version of Carbon Model Studio, the leading solution for the automatic generation, validation and implementation of hardware-accurate software models, to dramatically reduce the time it takes to develop and deploy new system models. Additional capabilities were added to Carbon Model Studio to reduce the debug time and improve the generation of Model Validation components.
In an interview with Portable Design, Bill Neifert, chief technical officer (CTO) at Carbon Design Systems, maintained that the transaction-level modeling (TLM) that underpins ESL is becoming mainstream, but past approaches don’t scale well. “We’ve seen it go from being something that’s being used for single projects to being scaled out to the enterprise. They’re finding that the issues that they encountered with a single project aren’t scaling to 5-10 platforms. There you may have 20-30 models you need to write, validate, maintain and synch up. That’s the biggest problem encountered when scaling ESL to the enterprise.”
With improved model validation, design teams can control the model validation generation process from inside Carbon Model Studio through a new component editor. The Model Validation component’s mixed-language shadow hierarchy matches that of the original design for tighter integration into complex testbenches, assertion languages and custom validation environments.
A key debug improvement provides increased visibility into complex design constructs. Carbon Model Studio offers full visibility into named and unnamed generate blocks, VHDL composite types and multi-dimensional arrays, including nested arrays and composites. In addition, Carbon Models have new application programming interface (API) calls for accessing design constructs.
Carbon Model Studio is the only model generation solution with integrations to a wide variety of commercial and open source virtual platforms, such as environments from CoWare, MIPS, OSCI SystemC, Synopsys and VaST. It is used by the entire design team, from system architects and software engineers to hardware designers and third-party intellectual property (IP) providers. System architects can use it for architectural analysis and profiling. Software engineers can develop and debug embedded software, firmware, drivers and diagnostics concurrent with hardware development. Carbon Models can be securely distributed to third-party partners to accelerate adoption of an IP provider’s technology devices.
Carbon Model Studio is shipping now and is available for Solaris and PC platforms running Linux and Windows. Pricing for the complete model-generation and execution solution is “use-model” dependent and starts at $20,000.
Carbon Design Systems, Acton, MA (978) 264-7300 [www.carbondesignsystems.com]
