Summit Design And ARM To Support Visual Elite ESC Co-Design And Co-Verification Platform

SystemC-based development platform seamlessly integrates the ARM CCM model family

BURLINGTON, MASS AND CAMBRIDGE, UK - Sept. 2, 2003 - Summit Design, Inc., a leading provider of electronic system-level (ESL) design solutions and methodologies, and ARM [(LSE: ARM); (Nasdaq: ARMHY)], the industry's leading provider of 16/32-bit embedded RISC microprocessor solutions, today announced that Summit has extended its EDA Partnership agreement with ARM and has licensed the ARM® Cycle-Callable Models (CCMs) for distribution with Summit's Visual Elite ESC product.

Visual Elite ESC is a SystemC-based hardware/software, co-design and co-verification environment with integrated Instruction Set Simulator (ISS) models for target processors. Visual ESC's high-level design methodology, together with its tight link into the ARM CCMs, will offer developers a design strategy for faster development of complex next-generation products.

ARM CCMs are transaction-accurate simulation models of ARM processors, designed to be easily integrated with custom cycle-based simulators. Each CCM contains a high-speed cycle-based behavioral model, an ARM debug interface and ARM memory interface.

"This extension of our EDA Partnership agreement with Summit Design will provide developers of ARM Powered® systems with a highly featured co-design flow to create and simulate their hardware and software design components in a co-design environment," said Noel Hurley, manager of EDA Alliances, ARM. "Executable System models, enabled by ARM's Cycle-Callable Models, will significantly enhance the hardware and software co-design process and reduce overall time-to-market."

Visual Elite ESC is a new generation ESL solution that enables the modeling and verification of system-level hardware with the system software, and provides architecture and performance modeling and analysis. The Visual Virtual Prototype allows users to create an executable model of the system, incorporating the embedded processor model. This model provides the software development team with a development and testing platform before the hardware has been implemented. This significantly reduces time-to-market by months.

"The agreement with ARM is a strategic milestone for us," said Rami Rachamim, director of Marketing, Summit Design. "ARM is the industry leader with their RISC technology, and is also one of the main driving forces for SystemC and ESL. We are seeing an increasing demand for high level modeling and performance analysis capabilities for ARM core-based platforms and we are providing those solutions leveraging ARM's Cycle Callable Models"

Visual Elite ESC possesses the verification speed afforded by SystemC and transaction-level communication, while achieving highly accurate ISS performance. It provides powerful debugging and tracing capabilities for both hardware and software, including assembly and source level debugging.

About Visual Elite

Visual Elite is a high performance, high-level C/C++ and SystemC functional and architectural modeling and verification environment. The environment supports a comprehensive design and verification flow from high-level specifications, through to partitioning and verification. Visual Elite enables engineers to quickly capture and analyze system concepts, verify the design, and take it down to HDL RTL implementation.

About ARM

ARM is the industry's leading provider of 16/32-bit embedded RISC microprocessor solutions. The company licenses its high-performance, low-cost, power-efficient RISC processors, peripherals, and system-on-chip designs to leading international electronics companies. ARM also provides comprehensive support required in developing a complete system. ARM's microprocessor cores are rapidly becoming a volume RISC standard in such markets as portable communications, handheld computing, multimedia, digital consumer and embedded solutions. More information on ARM is available at http://www.arm.com.

About Summit Design

Summit Design is a leading international supplier of software products addressing engineering challenges met during the specification and implementation design phases of complex hardware/software systems. The world's top electronics companies use Summit Design's products to increase engineering productivity, shorten time-to-market, and improve product quality. Summit Design is headquartered in Burlington, Mass. with offices in Europe, Japan, Israel, and ROA. For more information on Summit and its products, visit http://www.sd.com

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