For the year 2009, EDA tool vendor Carbon Design Systems said it has reported a 28-percent year-over-year growth in key market segments worldwide, including wireless and consumer electronics. The growth was most notable in Europe and in Asia.

Also in 2009, Carbon said it has added 12 accounts.

"Despite a difficult economic climate, we continued to gain market momentum in 2009," commented Rick Lucier, Carbon's president and chief executive officer. "We accomplished this by adding a host of marquee names to our customer list and by gaining endorsements from major IP vendors."

Looking ahead, Lucier said Carbon is optimistic about the prospects for 2010 with significant products being rolled out in the first half of the year, along with additions to our growing portfolio of IP partners.

For the year 2010, Carbon said it plans to continue to reduce the time, effort and cost required to produce and maintain virtual platforms at all levels of abstraction. It aims to enrich the product line and to expand partnerships and alliances.

Carbon said it also expects to roll out the integration of Fast Models from ARM with SoC Designer and to work to expand the adoption of TLM-2.0 for AMBA with cycle-accurate definitions.

Carbon was quite active in 2009.

In December, it announced that its ARM IP library now includes the entire Cortex and ARM11 families of processors, along with ARM9 and ARM7 family of processors. Moreover, it provides support for the ARM AMBA NIC301 Network Interconnect, as well as the AMBA AXI, AHB and APB peripherals.

It also concluded partnerships with companies such as Tensilica, VeriSilicon and CEVA in a view to help users of its SoC Designer leverage their IP.

Additionally, Carbon and CoWare joined forces to develop implementation-accurate models of ARM IP targeted for CoWare.