ARM has acquired the product portfolio and other business assets of Carbon Design Systems (Carbon), a supplier of cycle-accurate virtual prototyping solutions. ARM claims that this combination of assets and expertise will enhance its capability in SoC architectural exploration, system analysis and software bring-up.
"Early stage virtual prototyping of complex SoCs is now mandatory for leading silicon vendors, as demonstrated by the success of ARM Fast Models," said Hobson Bullman, general manager, development solutions group, ARM.
"The integration of Carbon’s virtual prototyping products into the ARM portfolio will deliver access to ARM IP earlier in the design cycle. This builds on the current industry leading solutions to enable further design optimisation, time-to-market and cost-efficiency gains for our partners,” Bullman continued.
Carbon has created a library of ARM processor and system models that can be extended to create cycle-accurate virtual prototypes of any new ARM-based SoC. The technology relies on RTL compilation, to ensure perfect functional and cycle accuracy. This is essential when evaluating target benchmark performance in the earliest stages of SoC design.
Carbon products will now be marketed as ARM Cycle Models and will remain available from ARM IP Exchange. ARM will also continue to offer Carbon’s solutions for model generation and SoC analysis.
Pic: Hobson Bullman, general manager, development solutions group, ARM
Author
Tom Austin-Morgan
Source: www.newelectronics.co.uk