| Out in Front |
Omniview’s new Performance Modeling Workbench (PMW) helps you with early modeling and evaluation of system hardware and software components—a real bottleneck in design. PMW lets you create and simulate hardware and software models in VHDL and analyze the system for performance metrics, such as latency, throughput, and utilization. PMW includes a parameterized library of VHDL models describing hardware blocks, such as processors, memories, communication cells, and I/O devices. You customize the blocks to meet your system specification and connect them in a graphical editor. You input software models either graphically with flow charts or textually in VHDL or C. PMW automatically converts flowchart and C representations to VHDL. You can also add your own models in VHDL or build them from a combination of primitive blocks in PMW’s library.
After you combine the system blocks, PMW creates a VHDL model of the composite system. You use a third-party VHDL simulator, such as Mentor Graphics’ (Wilsonville, OR) QuickVHDL, Cadence’s (San Jose, CA) Leapfrog, or Viewlogic’s (Marlborough, MA) Vantage Optium to simulate the system and collect data, or metrics, describing performance. You then use PMW’s graphical-analysis tools, which include histograms and activity time lines, to analyze how the system functions. PMW also has a “hot-spot analyzer” that uses a pseudotemperature scale to color the system blocks and show how a metric, such as utilization, varies from block to block and over time.
PMW is in beta test and will be in production this quarter. The system runs on Hewlett-Packard and Sun workstations. Price of a typical system, including all software and the library, is approximately $50,000.—by Jim Lipman
Omniview, San Mateo, CA. (415) 286-9400, fax (415) 286-9458.
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