"CoWare is firmly committed to the development of industry standards for SystemC TLM [transaction-level modeling] and this announcement reflects that goal," said AK Kalekos, CoWare vice president marketing and business development, in a statement.

SCML application programming interfaces and methodology guidelines, introduced in January, are intended to offer infrastructure for the creation of user-defined, highly-reusable TLM peripheral models in SystemC. According to CoWare (San Jose, Calif.), SCML helps separate TLM communication, storage, timing and behavior within the peripheral model, making code more modular and more efficient to develop and test.

"Semiconductor companies must change their product development strategies to successfully shift focus from individual products to product platforms," said Nobu Matsumoto, chief specialist in the digital media SoC department center for semiconductor R&D at Toshiba Corp., one of 10 companies and organizations to endorse CoWare's offering. "For the multi-core MeP digital media platforms at Toshiba, transaction-level model interoperability and design reuse based on standards is a cornerstone of this strategy. SCML methods, combined with fast MeP processor models, enable our system architects to successfully deliver platform models earlier, and at the right level of abstraction, to both software and hardware teams."

CoWare's SCML source code library kit includes SCML API library source code, SCML source code modeling examples, build scripts for the OSCI open-source proof-of-concept SystemC library and CoWare Model Designer using gcc 3.2.3, the SCML API Reference Manual and the SCML Modeling TLM Peripherals User Guide. The kit is available at no charge for download on CoWare's Web site.