08 July 2008

Carbon Design Systems Set To Develop ARM SoC Designer Tool

ARM has confirmed that Carbon Design Systems, an ARM Connected Community member, has signed an agreement under which Carbon will take over the future development, support and sale of ARM's SoC Designer tool. 

“As a leading company in 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. This arrangement makes the models available for interoperation in other environments, ensuring our customers have a choice of design flows”

Under the terms of the agreement, key members of the ARM SoC Designer development team will join Carbon Design Systems and form a new Carbon development office located in Irvine, California. Carbon will also gain access to ARM intellectual property (IP) in order to optimize its tools to offer customers a kit for the generation of cycle-accurate models of ARM processors, PrimeCell peripherals and fabric IP, the companies said. 

This kit enables ARM Partners to create cycle-accurate models of ARM IP and to 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 intellectual property is a natural extension of Carbon’s model-focused strategy,” explained Rick Lucier, CEO of Carbon. “The majority of our customers are already using ARM IP in their 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.”

“Carbon doubled its customer base last year by focusing our resources in the virtual prototyping space,” added Lucier.  “Working with ARM, we will now be able to further shorten the time-to-market schedules of our SoC customers by accelerating the generation of accurate, high-speed models.”

“This agreement gives Carbon access to ARM IP to optimize our automated cycle-accurate model creation tools for all of ARM processors and PrimeCell IP including the latest Cortex-A9 application processor.  We will be working non-stop to quickly bring this model generation capability to ARM Partners,” explained Tom Rathje, vice president of Engineering at Carbon.

“The model generation flow will be optimized and validated using the RTL code, ensuring speed and accuracy.  The processor models will also leverage the Carbon model application programming interface (API) to offer a direct connection to the ARM RealView Debugger. Carbon-generated models of ARM IP will offer our customers the fastest, most-accurate path for firmware development and architectural exploration,” added Rathje