CoWare System Reduces Design Time at STMicroelectronics

The Programmable Products Group of STMicroelectronics (STM) has reduced design time by a factor of four using the N2C design system developed by CoWare.

The N2C design system lets IC design teams create system specifications. It also allows these teams to test hardware and software against system specifications throughout the design process.

N2C includes 10 design and integration functional modules. In addition, this system co-exists with most of the software tools that IC companies use now and facilitates the use of HDL simulators, instruction set simulators (ISS), integrated development environment (IDE) tools, and real-time operating systems (RTOS).

STM employed the N2C system during the design of a next-generation wireless phone architecture. The system was used for the complete architectural validation, from behavioral-level description to hardware/software co-development of a complex design that includes STM's core microprocessors.

During the project, a link was built between CoWare N2C and STM's hardware emulation environment. By doing this, STM ran co-simulations between CoWare RT-level descriptions, RT-level VHDL running on the emulator, and software running on an ISS.

According to Marco Carilli, manager of STM's System-On-A-Chip Design (SOC) Group, N2C let STM quickly develop a new architecture while implementing the hardware and software at the same time. In addition, the system let STM continually test results against golden models to make sure the designs met specification.