Rami Rachamim, director of product marketing for Innoveda's System-Level Design group, said the product's new name, Visual Elite, reflects its extensive overhaul. "It is our next-generation product that we have moved up to the system level," said Rachamim. "It extends the scope of the product. Now with the expansion of support of C++, users can start at the system-prototype level and construct a system model and gradually go down into the implementation level" within one environment.

Visual Elite allows users to perform co-simulation of Verilog and VHDL, design entry and simulation in C/C++, and co-simulation of C/C++ and hardware description languages (HDLs).

Rachamim said Visual Elite users can describe C-level and abstract data types within the C language and define a system using either a library of protocols provided with the system or custom protocols.

He said the tool allows users to capture and integrate their specification at any level, then simulate at system level and register-transfer level, or co-simulate both C++ and HDL in one environment. The previous version of the technology worked on the same premise but started at the HD level and didn't support mixed HDLs, let alone C.

Visual Elite supports all current Visual HDL format files and all files can be transferred from Visual HDL to Visual Elite, Rachamim said.

The tool starts at $15,000, and the full version is priced around $50,000. Visual HDL 6.7 customers will be upgraded to Visual Elite, but those customers wishing to have the added features will have to pay an upgrade fee.