October 21, 2009 -- Carbon Design Systems has announced full support for Fast Models from ARM in its SoC Designer virtual platform. This support will let users leverage a single virtual platform environment for every aspect of their development process. SoC Designer now lets users easily perform tasks ranging from application software development to low-level firmware development and even architectural design.

The Fast Models product family from ARM includes programmer’s view (PV) models for the ARM9, ARM11 and Cortex families of processors, including the Cortex-A9 MPCore multicore processor. The Fast Model products also include configuration tools that enable the export of ARM processor-based subsystems with OSCI SystemC and TLM-2.0 compliant interfaces.

Matches abstraction level to the design task

"ARM’s Fast Models execute at speeds of up to 250MHz," stated Tom Rathje, Vice President of Engineering at Carbon. "By integrating these models into SoC Designer, we’ve enabled our users to perform all of their development tasks in a single virtual platform. Architects can use the cycle-accurate capabilities of SoC Designer and Carbon’s implementation-accurate ARM models to make key architectural decisions and optimize the throughput and power usage of their complex SOC designs. Firmware engineers can leverage the hardware/ software debug capabilities of SoC Designer to quickly identify and fix their issues. Software developers can now use this same platform, together with the Fast Models from ARM to debug application-level software. Carbon has enabled our users to swap and play any model in the system to seamlessly tradeoff accuracy and performance.”

About the integration

The Fast Models from ARM are integrated into SoC Designer using OSCI TLM2.0. Other models in the system can be modeled using whatever level of abstraction desired by the user to meet his or her needs. An application developer can represent the system in high-level, loosely timed TLM2.0 models and create a completely functional system inside of SoC Designer, which executes nearly as fast as the real silicon, but with far greater visibility.

If greater accuracy is desired, any of the components in the system can be easily swapped with more accurate models. These include approximately timed TLM2.0 models or even 100% implementation-accurate models compiled from the actual design RTL by Carbon Model Studio. The combination of the advanced capabilities of SoC Designer, the speed of the Fast Models and the accuracy of the Carbon library of implementation-accurate ARM models delivers users a complete solution for modeling ARM technology-based SOC designs.

Availability