Carbon Design Systems Acquires SoC Designer from ARM
Portable Design News, Monday July 07, 2008
ARM and Carbon Design Systems today announced an agreement under which Carbon will take over future development, support and sale of the SoC Designer tool.
Key members of the ARM SoC Designer development team will join Carbon Design Systems and form a new Carbon development office located in Irvine, Calif. Carbon will also gain access to ARM intellectual property (IP) in order to optimize its tools to generate cycle-accurate models of ARM processors, PrimeCell peripherals and fabric IP. This will enable ARM Partners to create cycle-accurate models of ARM IP, and provide a seamless transition for users of the SoC Designer tool to a new environment based upon models generated directly from ARM register transfer level (RTL) code.
“The ability to optimize the Carbon tool chain to work seamlessly with ARM’s intellectual property is a natural extension of Carbon’s model-focused strategy,” said Rick Lucier, CEO of Carbon in a statement. “The majority of our customers are already using ARM IP in their system on chip (SoC) designs. This agreement will enable Carbon to deliver a complete cycle-accurate tools solution to our customers, including the SoC Designer tool, enabling the generation of highly accurate models derived directly from the IP RTL code.”
Portable Design asked Bill Neifert, Carbon's CTO and founder, why ARM would turn SoC Designer over to the Carbon when it’s such a key development tool for the company. According to Neifert, “The number one problem that ARM faced when they sold this tool themselves was the number one problem that Carbon solves. ARM increasingly found that as they developed more and more complex processors that generating models that represented the behavior of these processors grew increasingly difficult and increasingly expensive to the point where they didn’t see themselves being able to do it profitably going forward. Carbon has the technology to generate these models directly from the RTL, so we solve the biggest problem that they had in this space. It’s just natural that Carbon would be a home for them.”
ARM executives definitely see a fit. “As the leading company for system model creation, Carbon is a natural partner for the continuing support of our customers using SoC Designer and cycle-accurate models of ARM IP,” said John Cornish, vice president and general manager, ARM System Design Division. “The agreement between ARM and Carbon will ensure customers have access to a fast, cycle-accurate design environment in which they can architect and validate advanced SoC designs based on ARM IP.”
Neifert pointed out that Carbon is already installed in approximately 30% of the SOC Designer accounts that are out there right now, so they have a large mutual account base. Carbon also supports these designs and is able to generate models for them, so he predicts the transition will be smooth.
With ARM outsourcing some prime software development to an EDA company, will other EDA vendors be left out in the cold? “The other people in the market who need these cycle accurate models—CoWare is one example, Mentor another—they’re currently use a model from ARM,” said Neifert. “ARM will no longer supply them, so we’re working our partnership angle there in order to make sure that this modeling technology is available to them as well.”
ARM will certainly become a major focus for Carbon. Portable Design asked Neifert whether other processor vendors might start feeling neglected. Neifert declared, “Carbon is not suddenly going to become a platform company that also builds models, we will remain a modeling company that also sells the platform. And the models that we generate will work simultaneously on every platform that we support.”
By John Donovan – Editor-in-Chief
Carbon Design Systems, Acton, MA (978) 264-7300 [www.carbondesignsystems.com]
ARM Inc., Sunnyvale, CA (408) 734 5600 [www.arm.com]
