Co-Design Automation Inc., based here, is believed to be working on the specification, simulation and verification of high-level system-on-a-chip descriptions through extensions to the Verilog language.

The company is being led by Simon Davidmann, a British EDA veteran who, early in his career, worked on HiLo, the first simulation language and simulator. More recently, he has led the European operations of Ambit Design Systems and Virtual Chips.

"The goal is much earlier specification and verification than is possible at the moment," said Davidmann. "Verilog is too low and it's too slow." Davidmann said the technology, when formally launched as an EDA tool, would operate before and after partitioning of a system-level design into hardware and software.

"The problem is you can model behavior and algorithms in C, but you can't design hardware in C and you can't model a million-gate chip in Verilog," he said. "A smart person would want to bridge that gap, and I've got a team of smart people." One of them is Peter Flake, who worked as an architect of the HiLo simulation language and as an EDA consultant in the U.K.

"We have people involved who worked on HiLo, Verilog and the next step up after that, which was compiled-code simulators," Davidmann said. It is believed that Phil Moorby, a developer of both Hilo and Verilog, may either be employed by Co-Design Automation or acting as a consultant to the company.

Co-Design has had investment in place since June. Funds are believed to have come from a number of Silicon Valley customers with whom Co-Design is already working. Davidmann would not say how much backing the company has received.

Although Co-Design will have a U.K. development team, Davidmann said the company will be based in the United States, where he will spend most of his time.

"The U.S. is where the major development will be done. We have working technology but you have to go to customers and look at the real problems that are out there," he said.

Gary Smith, principal EDA analyst at Dataquest Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), said that Davidmann is "one of the guys who has a very good chance of putting something out there that's really going to work. He's got some of the world's experts involved in this technology."