Cadence Announces Production Release of Virtual Platform for Xilinx Zynq-7000 Extensible Processing Platform

Cadence Virtual System Platform Used by Missing Link Electronics to Dramatically Reduce Time-to-Market for Automotive Infotainment and Medical Systems

NUREMBERG, Germany, 27 Feb 2012  -- Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CDNS), a leader in global electronic design innovation, today announced that the company’s virtual platform for the Xilinx Zynq™-7000 Extensible Processing Platform (EPP) is available as a production release. Designed to streamline the embedded software development process, the virtual platform enables simultaneous development of hardware and software before hardware availability, providing significant savings in development costs and time-to-market. The Zynq-7000 EPP virtual platform, built on the Cadence® Virtual System Platform, was already used by Missing Link Electronics, a Cadence customer and Xilinx Certified Alliance Program Member to design an application development platform for automotive infotainment and medical systems. Demonstrations of Missing Link Electronics’ platform are available this week at Xilinx’s booth (1.205 in Hall 1) at Embedded World in Nuremberg, Germany.

"Time-to-market is extremely important for our customers' new smart products, and the challenge lies in the software complexity,” said Endric Schubert, founder and CTO of Missing Link Electronics, Inc. “The Cadence virtual platform enables us to regularly pre-validate our rich open source software stack, even when decoupled from our FPGA hardware development environment."

“Stable, high-performance software applications are critical to the success of any sophisticated embedded system,” said Michał Siwiński, group director of product marketing, System & Software Realization Group, Cadence. “Software engineers need access to pre-verified virtual platforms to build applications in confidence, knowing that the code they write on the virtual platform will quickly and cleanly converge with hardware.”

A fast, pre-verified, feature-rich model of a Xilinx Zynq-7000 EPP, the virtual platform is based on the Cadence Virtual System Platform technology. A component of the Cadence System Development Suite, the Cadence Virtual System Platform features tightly integrated hardware and software debugging (including multi-core debug support), mixed domain simulation and acceleration and the ability to automatically build new model TLM 2.0 register interfaces with error-checking, test generation, and documentation from an IP-XACT description. In addition to mirroring the EPP hardware, the virtual platform can be extended using transaction-level modeling (TLM) to support custom devices that will ultimately be instantiated within the Zynq-7000 device’s programmable logic.

“Our Zynq-7000 EPP combines a complete dual-core ARM processor system with our 28nm programmable logic, giving customers the ability to build differentiated products yet still use an industry-standard processing solution that they are familiar with,” said Mark Jensen, director, processing platforms marketing at Xilinx. “We’ve worked closely with Cadence to develop a virtual platform for our hardware to reduce customers’ design times and enable early software development.”

Availability

The Cadence virtual platform for the Zynq-7000 EPP is available now to customers who are in the Xilinx early access program. Pricing is available upon request.

About the Zynq-7000 EPP

The Zynq-7000 family is Xilinx's first Extensible Processing Platform (EPP). This new class of product combines an industry-standard ARM dual-core Cortex™-A9 MPCore™ processing system with Xilinx 28nm unified programmable logic architecture. This processor-centric architecture offers the flexibility and scalability of an FPGA combined with ASIC-like performance and power and the ease of use of an ASSP. The extensible Virtual Platform Early Access program has begun and will open to a broader customer base by the end of this year.

About Cadence

Cadence enables global electronic design innovation and plays an essential role in the creation of today's integrated circuits and electronics. Customers use Cadence software, hardware, IP, and services to design and verify advanced semiconductors, consumer electronics, networking and telecommunications equipment, and computer systems. The company is headquartered in San Jose, Calif., with sales offices, design centers, and research facilities around the world to serve the global electronics industry. More information about the company, its products, and services is available at www.cadence.com.