Carbon Design System adds support for fast models from ARM

ACTON, USA: Carbon Design Systems, a leading supplier of tools for the automatic creation, validation and deployment of system-level models, has announced full support for Fast Models from ARM in its SoC Designer virtual platform.

This support will enable users to leverage a single virtual platform environment for every aspect of their development process. SoC Designer now enables users to easily perform tasks ranging from application software development to low-level firmware development and even architectural design.

The Fast Models product family from ARM includes programmer's view (PV) models for the ARM9, ARM11 and Cortex families of processors, including the Cortex-A9 MPCore multicore processor. The Fast Model products also include configuration tools that enable the export of ARM processor-based subsystems with OSCI SystemC and TLM-2.0 compliant interfaces.

“ARM's Fast Models execute at speeds of up to 250MHz,” stated Tom Rathje, vice president of Engineering at Carbon. “By integrating these models into SoC Designer, we've enabled our users to perform all of their development tasks in a single virtual platform. Architects can use the cycle-accurate capabilities of SoC Designer and Carbon's implementation-accurate ARM models to make key architectural decisions and optimize the throughput and power usage of their complex SoC designs.

"Firmware engineers can leverage the hardware/software debug capabilities of SoC Designer to quickly identify and fix their issues. Software developers can now use this same platform, together with the Fast Models from ARM to debug application level software. Carbon has enabled our users to swap and play any model in the system to seamlessly tradeoff accuracy and performance.”

About the integration
The Fast Models from ARM are integrated into SoC Designer using OSCI TLM2.0. Other models in the system can be modeled using whatever level of abstraction desired by the user to meet their needs. An application developer can represent the system in high-level, loosely timed TLM2.0 models and create a completely functional system inside of SoC Designer, which executes nearly as fast as the real silicon but with far greater visibility.

If greater accuracy is desired, any of the components in the system can be easily swapped with more accurate models. These include approximately timed TLM2.0 models or even 100 percent implementation-accurate models compiled from the actual design register transfer level (RTL) by Carbon Model Studio.

The combination of the advanced capabilities of SoC Designer, the speed of the Fast Models and the accuracy of the Carbon library of implementation-accurate ARM models delivers users a complete solution for modeling ARM technology-based SoC designs.

“We are seeing an increasing demand for high performance models in the industry,” said Mark Onions, director of marketing, System Design Division, ARM. “The integration of the Fast Models portfolio with SoC Designer enables our customers to choose the most suitable model for each stage of their development all within the same development environment.”

The SoC Designer with support for Fast Models is available now to select customers and will be generally available in the first quarter of 2010.