Carbon introduces exchange for building and stressing virtual prototypes

By Chris Edwards |  No Comments  |  Posted: October 4, 2014
Topics/Categories: Blog - EDA, IP  |  Tags: , , , , , ,  | Organizations: , , ,

Carbon Design Systems has introduced a web portal to streamline the process of finding the most appropriate executable models for a system-level virtual prototype.

The Carbon System Exchange portal today includes more than 100 pre-built virtual prototypes that cover the most common types of platform in use today as well as the company’s performance analysis kits (CPAKs). The selection includes ARM fast models, for which Carbon extended its cooperation with the British processor designer earlier this year, as well as IP from Arteris, Cadence Design Systems, NetSpeed Systems, and OpenSilicon.

Carbon CTO Bill Neifert said: “People were coming to our older portal to find models for cores such as the Cortex-A57. They would find 12 different ones there and maybe 20 for the CCI-400 interconnect. It starts to become unmanageable to find the ones you want and assemble them into a prototype. It became obvious that a better way was needed to sort through this.

“So we decided to offer pre-built systems that offer the best representative starting point for a given system. You can narrow down the options by interconnect, memory controller or GPU options, for example. Each one is configurable,” Neifert added. The user interface lets users specify the combination of IP cores and options – such as cache size – they want to match a particular core prototype model or CPAK.

Neifert said the exchange approach provides the ability to include technologies not just for assembling a prototype but exercising it. A further recent expansion is into software-driven verification. A deal with Breker Verification Systems provides the ability to “run software to stress a system”, Neifert said. “It lets you see how well IP plays in these ARM-based systems, and see it reacts to the corner cases.

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