Synopsys is the leading provider of electronic design automation (EDA) software and services used to design complex integrated circuits (ICs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and systems-on-chips (SoCs) for the global semiconductor and electronics industries. Synopsys is also a leader in providing advanced technology to address yield and manufacturing issues early in the design process, and in delivering pre-designed and pre-verified blocks of intellectual property (IP) that can be easily inserted into design flows.

Using Virtual Platforms for Pre-Silicon Software Development
Meeting the challenges of software-dominated design projects 

Recent market research indicates that today - in 2008- the development effort for software running on 90nm and below has already surpassed the effort for the hardware development.  The projection for 2011 is that less than 40% of the chip development cost is spent on hardware.  It is the software which dominates and has become the bottleneck.

This free white paper provides an overview of the topic of using virtual platforms for pre-silicon software development.  The paper describes an example of several virtual platforms and the different use models.  Click Here to download

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Synopsys´ system-level solutions offer a versatile portfolio of system-level design tools, models and services to address algorithm design and analysis, as well as Virtual Platform-based architecture design, software integration and system validation. This portfolio accelerates the development of platform-based systems and SOC-based products and can realize up to a 12 month time-to-market reduction.

Integrated Solution

Synopsys´ system-level solutions provide the following benefits:

• The broadest portfolio of abstract models for building Virtual Platforms.
• Tools that integrate algorithm models into Virtual Platforms for early software verification.
• A unified system-to-RTL verification environment to ensure the models at all levels of abstraction (system, architecture and RTL) stay consistent, resulting in a predictable, concurrent hardware and software development flow.

• The DesignWare System-Level Library is a collection of high-performance transaction-level models (TLMs) for building virtual platforms. Virtual Platforms provide software engineers with high-speed software execution environments that allow development of SOC-related software before hardware is available. The Library includes TLM´s of ARM processors, DesignWare Cores, and DesignWare AMBA components as well as pre-assembled reference platforms. These models are written in SystemC to work in any IEEE 1666 compliant SystemC simulator, including Synopsys´ Innovator.

• Innovator is a powerful fully integrated development environment (IDE) for developing, debugging and running Virtual Platforms at multiple levels of abstraction It has full SystemC support. 

• System Studio is a versatile system-level design environment focused on algorithms design and analysis. Its advanced data flow modeling and the industry´s fastest simulation enable the specification and optimization of even the most complex signal processing algorithms. Algorithm models developed with System Studio can easily be integrated into Innovator to become part of a Virtual Platform. Algorithm models can easily be integrated into VCS to become part of an advanced verification setup.

 Services and Training

Synopsys´ provides expert system-level services to help you:

• Develop new and/or custom TLMs
• Assemble, customize and test virtual platforms using TLMs and Innovator
• Establish a robust methodology for virtual platform development and train your engineers on the flow