CoWare Introduces CORXpert Technology to Help Boost Processor Performance

DESIGN AUTOMATION CONFERENCE, ANAHEIM, Calif. -- June 13, 2005 -- CoWare Inc., the leading supplier of electronic system-level (ESL) design software and services, introduced CORXpert™ technology, a new part of its LISATek™ product family, that automates the path for software developers to develop custom instructions to improve processor performance, creating differentiated products. With CORXpert Personality Kits for a particular processor—created by CoWare with processor vendors or semiconductor companies—software developers can rapidly develop and explore instructions to improve processor performance for a target application without impacting their time-to-market goals.

"Increasingly, designers are looking at software-driven differentiation. But, by putting all the differentiation in software, they may be compromising product performance. By offering a fast and easy way to extend the processor’s instruction set with user defined instructions that optimize specific application-software performance, we enable custom-hardware performance and the programmability benefits of software. It’s the best of both worlds," said AK Kalekos, vice president of marketing and business development for CoWare.

CORXpert Automates Processor Improvements for Software Developers
CORXpert improves the competitiveness of a product by enabling the best performance versus implementation cost trade-offs to be made early in the design. CORXpert gives software developers the ability to easily improve the available performance of their application code. For a given processor, CORXpert automates the generation of the Instruction Set Simulator (ISS), RTL implementation code and documentation, all from an easy to use graphical user interface (GUI). The GUI works with existing software tool flows so customers can be productive immediately—able to concentrate on adding performance, not on manual, often error prone tasks. And with familiar C code to define the instruction behavior, there is no hardware description language to learn.

High-quality RTL synthesis together with ready to run synthesis scripts allows a direct implementation path, without waiting to hand the design over to the hardware development team. This means there is no risk of misinterpretation of a paper specification. Generation of the instruction documentation that is consistent with the ISS models and RTL provides an easy way to communicate the new instructions to other software developers. And with these consistent models, verification time is reduced drastically compared to manual methods.

About CoWare
CoWare is the leading supplier of system-level electronic design automation (EDA) software tools and services. CoWare offers a comprehensive set of electronic system-level (ESL) tools that enable SoC developers to "differentiate by design" through the creation of system-IP including embedded processors, on-chip buses, and DSP algorithms; the architecture of optimized SoC platforms; and hardware/software co-design. The company's solutions are based on open industry standards including SystemC. CoWare's customers are major systems, semiconductor, and IP companies in the market where consumer electronics, computing, and communications converge. CoWare's corporate investors include ARM Ltd. [(LSE:ARM);(Nasdaq: ARMHY)], Cadence Design Systems (NYSE:CDN), STMicroelectronics (NYSE:STM), and Sony Corporation (NYSE:SNE). CoWare is headquartered in San Jose, Calif., and has offices around the world. For more information about CoWare and its products and services, visit http://www.coware.com.

CoWare and ConvergenSC are registered trademarks of CoWare, Inc. CORXpert and LISATek are trademarks of CoWare, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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