September 29, 2011 -- Synopsys, Inc. has launchedf TLMCentral, the first industry-wide web portal for developers and users of transaction-level model (TLM) technology. TLMCentral aggregates information about free and commercial system-level models of common system-on-chip (SOC) components from leading semiconductor IP vendors, tool providers, service companies and universities. TLMCentral is an open portal that will ease and accelerate the development of virtual prototypes across the industry. It is available at no cost to users and providers of transaction-level models.

What users can find at www.TLMCentral.com:

An initial listing of more than 600 system-level models of common SoC building blocks such as processor, interface and interconnect IP. Modeling support from experts around the world through a broad community of leading IP vendors, tool providers, service companies, consultants and universities. A centralized online resource with intuitive search functionality to find relevant models as well as industry news, forums and blogs.

"TLMCentral is aligned with ARM's strategy to participate in industry initiatives that accelerate product development cycles and further increase the rapid pace of innovation around the ARM architecture," said Lance Howarth, Executive Vice President of Marketing, ARM. "By listing ARM Fast Models on TLMCentral, we want to enable designers to efficiently source the transactional models and support they need to build virtual prototypes more quickly and start software development earlier."

"TI believes that the TLMCentral initiative has the potential to address a significant gap in the virtual platform ecosystem by enabling a supply of high quality interoperable models," Amit Nene, Engineering Manager, Texas Instruments. "TI has invested in and benefited from the use of virtual platforms and it would be great to be able to leverage such a repository to shrink time-to-market."

Escalating software content in semiconductor and electronic products is driving the adoption of virtual prototyping, which enables software development to start earlier and be completed with less effort than traditional methods. Until now, virtual prototype developers lacked a centralized resource for finding TLMs available from third-parties, often re-creating models that had already been developed. TLMCentral greatly improves the efficiency of developing virtual prototypes by providing an online infrastructure for aggregating free and commercial system-level models from across the industry, including more than 600 models at launch.

Using an intuitive search interface, engineers can rapidly find models at varying levels of speed and accuracy that are available for their design blocks. These models are contributed by leading IP vendors around the world including ARM, Arteris, CEVA, MIPS, Sonics, Synopsys, Tensilica and Vivante; leading service providers including HCL Technologies and Kasura; and leading research institutes including Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and RWTH Aachen University. In addition, TLMCentral offers industry news, forums and blogs to connect the TLM community.

"With the OSCI TLM-2.0 standard widely accepted by the industry, the introduction of an open portal takes an important step to ease the development, promotion and adoption of models based on our standard," said Eric Lish, Chairman of the Open SystemC Initiative. "We welcome this new collaboration between model creators and users to further develop and improve the TLM ecosystem."