Part of the companys RealView series of tools, they will be demonstrated at this weeks Design Automation Conference in San Francisco. The tools are said to give both hardware and software engineers the power to create and modify their own system models, which keeps NRE costs under control and protects unique IP by dispensing with third-party consultancies.

ARM (Cambridge, England) says the speed of the generated virtual prototypes produced by the System Generator is comparable to the speed of currently available mobile devices, making it possible to test application software as it will appear on the end device, months before hardware is available.

For a highly differentiated consumer electronics product to succeed, electronics vendors need a way to generate application software, perform testing of hardware and application software integration and validate the end-user experience as early as possible, said Bryn Parry, general manager, Development Systems, ARM. He adds the tool provides a target early in the design cycle that enables these tasks.

The company says by using the System Generator silicon vendors, OS or software vendors or system OEMs working with SoC- or ASIC-based systems would be able to work on application software development in parallel with hardware development, reducing integration time.

The first version of the System Generator includes fast processor core models for the ARM926EJ-S, ARM1136JF-S and ARM1176JZF-S processors, as well as for a number of ARM PrimeCell peripherals.