McLEAN, Va. — Nu Thena Systems Inc. is taking a more aggressive position in hardware/software codesign with Foresight Co-Design, a new offering that's a superset of the company's flagship Foresight product. Nu Thena is also announcing an OEM resale agreement with Mentor Graphics Corp. for Foresight Co-Design.

Foresight is a high-level modeling and simulation environment that comes with its own system-level design language. This language lets users describe systems well before any implementation decisions are made, and supports such concepts as concurrency.

Nu Thena has just released Foresight version 5.0, which adds hierarchical state diagrams. Chet Palesko, Nu Thena vice president of sales and marketing, said this capability lets users more easily model system functionality. But most of the development effort, he said, has gone into the creation of Foresight Co-Design.

This new product adds two primary features to Foresight 5.0 — a cosimulation capability with VHDL and Verilog, and libraries that can support silicon intellectual property (IP). Foresight itself can import C, but not VHDL or Verilog, into system-level models.

The cosimulation capability is provided through a link to Mentor's ModelSim VHDL and Verilog simulators. "We set up a synchronization system between Foresight and ModelSim," said Palesko. Users can thus mix system-level models with detailed hardware models, although ModelSim will run much more slowly than a Foresight simulation.

Palesko described this co-simulation as "very complementary" to Mentor's Seamless CVE product, which lets users run software debugging tools along with VHDL or Verilog simulation. "Seamless can run detailed software against detailed hardware, but it has no way of doing high-level models," said Palesko. "We allow that detail to be mixed in with a high-level model of the system."

The new libraries, meanwhile, include models of processors, standard buses, real-time operating systems and protocols. If a user is modeling a bus core, for instance, the library can provide the necessary information about functionality and protocols to determine if there's enough bandwidth and throughput to accomplish the design.

Palesko noted that the information in the library is at a very high level, and can be derived from publicly available datasheets. At a later stage, users can swap out the high-level models for HDL source code obtained from the IP vendor.

The first release of the library includes bus models such as PCI, Ethernet and fiber channel; processors such as ARM, 68000 family, MIPS, i960 and the DSP TMS320 series; and the VxWorks real-time operating system. Nu Thena plans to keep adding to the library.

Whether purchased from Nu Thena or Mentor Graphics, Foresight Co-Design is available in the third quarter on Unix and Windows NT platforms starting at $60,000. Foresight version 5.0 is $35,000.