News & Analysis
IBM's 'Sugar' to drive European system design project
Peter Clarke
2/17/2004 3:51 AM EST
The three-year project, known as Prosyd, was due to be launched at the Design Automation and Test Europe exhibition, which opens here today.
The project is being conducted by researchers from IBM Haifa Research Lab; Infineon Technologies in Munich, Germany; STMicroelectronics laboratories in UK, Italy and France; the Technical University of Graz in Austria; ITC-IRST in Trento; Verimag in France; the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel; and the Accellera EDA standards organization.
Accellera has standardized the Sugar design intent language as PSL and the project is intended to create tools that increase design productivity.
Initial funding for the Prosyd project is 7 million euros (about US$9 million), of which 4 million euros (about US$5.1 million) is due to come from European Union funds under the Information Society Technology (IST) sub-program of the European Union's sixth framework of research. A large portion of the activity is to be dedicated to marketing and dissemination of the tools and methodologies developed by the project team, IBM said.
The prime deliverable of the Prosyd project would be reference method and a set of PSL-based tools for property-based system design. The project also includes provision for large-scale deployment in Europe.
Yaron Wolfsthal, senior manager for formal verification and testing technologies at the IBM Haifa lab, where Sugar was conceived, said that with gate counts heading towards a billion a system-development flow where requirements could be fed forward to design, implementation and verification, was needed.
The participating companies aim to demonstrate a 30 percent improvement in design productivity and fewer design flaws making it through the verification phase, IBM said.
