Eve and CoWare link ESL to HW/SW co-verification

The folks at EVE and CoWare have announced a strategic alliance to provide design teams with an integrated approach that ties hardware/software co-verification from EVE with SystemC virtual platforms developed with CoWare's ESL 2.0 solutions.

The companies say that this link between two production-proven design flows, made possible through standard transaction-level interfaces, will reduce overall development time for multicore/multi-application systems on chip (SoCs). The integration will be demonstrated during the Electronic Design & Solution Fair (EDSFair) 2008 January 24-25 at the Pacifico Yokohama in Yokohama, Japan.

Linking EVE's ZeBu (for Zero Bugs) fast, state-of-the-art emulation with CoWare Platform Architect – via the fast transactor interface supported by ZeBu – reduces the time and effort needed to verify SoC designs that include a mix of SystemC and register transfer level (RTL) blocks. This is accomplished by co-executing RTL blocks in ZeBu and SystemC transaction-level platform in CoWare Platform Architect. This approach allows for early design optimization using a wider set of test scenarios before engineering samples and prototyping boards are available, and can be used ahead of a register transfer level (RTL) implementation of the complete SoC design.

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Additionally, by reusing the ESL virtual platform – the SystemC platform and embedded software – from previous design tasks, the time to set-up test environments to verify subsystem intellectual property (IP) with ZeBu is reduced. This improves design quality, enables the use of exact reference golden test streams for verification, and accelerates execution and debug to increase efficiency. The product development process is streamlined because complete system verification is completed before physical implementation.

Through the alliance, EVE and CoWare will to work together to introduce complementary transactor strategies and roadmaps based on the emerging Open SystemC Initiative (OSCI) Transaction Level Modeling (TLM2) standard for model interoperability. The companies say that because this integration is IP vendor independent, it offers more flexible support for design-chain requirements of mutual customers.