Carbon Design Systems Posts Record Sales

“We solidified our leadership position in 2011 by helping architects optimize performance and cost,” affirms Rick Lucier, Carbon’s president and chief executive officer. “Firmware teams throughout the world now rely on Carbon to help debug system-level problems prior to tapeout, ensuring their firmware runs on silicon the first day back in the lab.”

Rapid adoption of advanced IP, such as the ARM Cortex A15, Cortex R5, Cortex A7, and Cortex A9, has increased demand for Carbon‘s 100% accurate system-level models for these platforms from Carbon IP Exchange, a web-based model portal. In 2011, Carbon IP Exchange grew to more than 400 registered users who have downloaded more than 2,500 models for virtual prototyping of their SoC designs.
During 2011, Carbon added Mentor Graphics and CEVA as Carbon IP Exchange partners to complement its existing partners: ARM, Cadence Design Systems, Elliptic Technologies, MIPS Technologies, Tensilica, VeriSilicon and Vivante Corporation. A TLM-2.0 solution for the AMBA® protocol for modeling with SystemC TLM2-0 was also added to Carbon IP Exchange at no charge.

Aided by Carbon’s Swap n’ Play solution, the adoption of SoC Designer Plus continues to expand and address the needs of the firmware developer. Swap n’ Play works in conjunction with ARM Fast Models allowing engineers to boot any operating system within seconds on a virtual prototype and rapidly develop and debug system software. When more accuracy is required, either to debug a system issue, develop a piece of driver code or perform accurate profiling, the system can dynamically swap to an equivalent, 100% accurate representation. This approach gives design teams a way to leverage a single virtual platform for a variety of use cases.