CoWare Introduces First ESL 2.0 Technology Release for the Design of Processor- and Software-Intensive Electronic Platforms

New Release Greatly Simplifies the Adoption of ESL Technologies and Improves Design Efficiency Required to Deploy ESL and Accelerate Design Innovation

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- November 5, 2007 -- CoWare®, Inc., the leading supplier of platform-driven electronic system-level (ESL) design software and services, announced the first product release supporting companies in their transition from the proof-of-concept ESL era to ESL 2.0. ESL 2.0 refers to a second generation of ESL solutions, which aim to facilitate the design and development of processor-centric, software-intensive products with complex interconnect and memory architectures, in a production environment.

The need for ESL 2.0 has been created by the breakdown of old design methods and the emergence of new design challenges led by the need to design better products faster using multi-core designs. It also aims at breaking the isolation of each design/development team and enables enterprises to get better designed-into customer products sooner. Virtual hardware platforms are at the core of ESL 2.0, which is characterized by the combination of the following.

• The application of ESL technologies and methodologies to a larger community of users including architect and hardware development teams (at the origin of ESL), and now extended to software development, system integration, and test teams.

• The rapid rollout and use of these technologies and methodologies in a production environment.

• The use of virtual hardware platforms by the larger enterprise and its ecosystem through marketing and business development functions.

“A number of key trends within embedded systems engineering are driving growth in the ESL market including the increasing complexity of hardware platforms, the growing importance of software development, the anticipated increase in the use of virtual system prototyping, and the challenges associated with effective system architecture specification that currently represent one of the leading causes of schedule delay," said Matt Volckmann, Senior Analyst/Program Manager with Venture Development Corporation. "The continued maturity of ESL tools in combination with improving industry standards and the greater availability of required third-party IP elements at higher levels of abstraction will provide future opportunity for solution providers and help facilitate greater adoption of ESL methodologies.”

“Due to the rapid convergence of multicore designs, our customers are expanding the use of ESL technologies and methodologies into a production environment and to a wider set of users, including at their customers,” said Alan Naumann, president and CEO, CoWare. “This means they need ESL technology that works for them rather than them having to make it work. CoWare is the only company that has developed a comprehensive ESL solution with this in mind. Welcome to ESL 2.0.”

“Using CoWare ESL technologies, we were able to increase by 30% the performance of our production networking SoC while reducing our time to market by more than 55%,” said Mitsuhiro Kurata, Director LSI Development Department, Semiconductor Division, YAMAHA Corporation. “We are excited about the new CoWare release capabilities. It will make it even easier to deploy ESL technologies to other production design teams.”

CoWare is the first company to deliver a comprehensive and integrated offering for the ESL 2.0 era. The release supports the larger ESL 2.0 community with new features and benefits through a set of six solutions: Platform Architecture Design, Software Development, Platform Verification, Application Sub-System Design, Processor Design, and DSP Algorithm Design.

The new release delivers the required capabilities for a production use environment. First, through improved modeling productivity:

• 50 percent improvement in user ramp-up time required for the larger production teams through design starter kits
• 10x productivity improvement for the modeling of multicore platforms through
• SystemC Component Wizard with automatic test bench creation
• Bus Library Wizard for fast and easy interconnect set up
• Easy Connect for automatic resolution of point to point links
• Intuitive environment for library management, block diagram editing and platform configuration
• Expanded IP model library including new processor, interconnect, and peripheral IP models and a new Long-Term-Evolution (LTE) wireless library for DSP algorithm design
• Second, through improvements focused on design task productivity and quality of design including:
• Up to 200 percent platform simulation performance improvement and 400 percent standalone Instruction Set Simulator (ISS) performance improvement
• Easier and faster debug and analysis, through powerful new capabilities including:
• The new SystemC Explorer platform debugger
• The enhanced Virtual Platform Analyzer: simulation restart, memory map view, and software analysis
• 50 percent power consumption reduction and 30 percent performance improvement with new processor design features.   

Availability and Pricing

The new CoWare ESL 2.0 solution is available November 30, 2007, from CoWare. Pricing varies depending on the solution configuration required by the customer. For more information on CoWare’s complete ESL product line, visit http://www.coware.com.

About CoWare

CoWare is the leading global supplier of platform-driven electronic system-level (ESL) design software and services. IP, semiconductor, and electronics companies use CoWare ESL 2.0 solutions to design better processor- and software-intensive products faster. CoWare solutions solve the new design challenges associated with platform architecture design, platform verification, application sub-system design, processor design, DSP algorithm design, and software development, and are based on open industry standards including SystemC. These solutions also enable IP and semiconductor companies to implement more effective go-to-market strategies. CoWare’s corporate investors include ARM [(LSE: ARM); (NASDAQ: ARMHY)], Cadence Design Systems (NASDAQ: CDNS), 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.

Quotes from CoWare’s ecosystem partners endorsing this announcement.

ARC

“CoWare has shown its value in production designs at some of our key customers, said Karl Auker, director, strategic alliances, ARC International. “CoWare and ARC are working closely together to provide the same impact for ARC based designs. ARC and CoWare share a common vision regarding multimedia subsystem and multi-core designs and the value of ESL for both performance analysis and software development.”

Carbon Design Systems

“Together CoWare and Carbon are providing a practical solution that removes barriers to model availability and accuracy by increasing RTL reuse in a production-proven ESL design environment,” stated Rick Lucier, president and CEO at Carbon. “System designers can focus on the modeling of new IP, while we help increase the overall return on investment for platform modeling. It’s a great combination and we congratulate CoWare on the new release of Platform Architect.”

CEVA

“CoWare and CEVA are partnering to provide the best environment to do software development and performance analysis on CEVA-based subsystems,” said Eyal Ben Avraham, vice president of business development, CEVA. “This joint solution is being adopted by multiple CEVA customers as a key piece in their production design.”

MIPS Technologies

“Many customers across the entire range of MIPS processors depend on CoWare’s performance analysis capabilities to make key architectural design decisions,” said Jack Browne, vice president of marketing, MIPS. “We are working closely with CoWare to deliver performance optimization advantages to software programmers of future MIPS-Based™ systems.”

Silistix

“The CoWare value proposition is built on the same principle as the one of Silistix: it is insane to think that you will get better results by continuing to do the same thing in the same way,” says David Fritz, CEO, Silistix. “It is clear that with today’s market dynamics a different design approach is needed to succeed. The CoWare platform-driven ESL methodology is the best way to experience and optimize the value of Silistix predictable power, performance and area delivered by using self-timed (clockless) on-chip interconnect.”

Sonics

“More and more Sonics’ customers are adopting ESL tools to help complete their architecture exploration activities and to develop their platform SoC strategies based on Sonics SMART Interconnect solutions,” says Phil Casini, vice president of marketing and business development at Sonics, Inc. “CoWare continues to provide these customers with the advanced tools support that greatly aids in completing these activities in an efficient manner.”

Tensilica

“CoWare's ESL tools have been widely adopted by some of our largest customers,” said Chris Rowen, president and CEO, Tensilica. “The partnership between our two companies addresses two major industry needs – multi-processor platform exploration and reuse, and early software development – by providing the best design and software development environment for our joint customers.”

VeriSilicon

“CoWare has become crucial in the production design cycle of some of our main ZSP processor customers,” says Wayne Dai, CEO, VeriSilicon. “The CoWare ESL tools have not only proven to be critical for performance analysis, our customers are starting to use the tools for early software development. First results already indicate that this is significantly reducing the production design cycle.”