As an enabling technology for the wider implementation of system-level design, Tenison and Spiratech have created a closely integrated pairing of their respective VTOC and Cohesive EDA products. Tenison's software converts models of circuit blocks between levels of abstraction in a system-level design environment. In system-level design, Tenison says, you need to design with mixed tools and at multiple levels of abstraction. The company says that in a typical design, 80% of IP (intellectual property) is in RTL. Meanwhile, logic errors are still the dominant cause of design failure. You don't rewrite the RTL, and trying to write a model of it is a highly error-prone process.

VTOC lets you move models between levels of abstraction. Tenison adds the Spiratech software's ability to automatically generate "transactors," high-performance transaction-level interfaces to those models. Cohesive allows the user to formally specify an interface using a specialized language that then compiles to generate the transactor. Once the user has performed the formal specification, the software can create a bridge between any two levels of abstraction. Users can verify conformance to a protocol by entering a description of the protocol. So, VTOC converts RTL to SystemC, and Cohesive creates a transactional interface to it. Tenison Chief Technology Officer Jeremy Bennett says, "The ability to connect between models at different levels of abstraction is a cornerstone of any practical ESL solution," and Spiratech Chief Executive Officer Simon Calder says, "There are no excuses left for not adopting an ESL methodology; this tool combination greatly eases the connection of transaction-level models to the design-and-verification tool flow."

In a parallel announcement, Tenison has also produced a version of the VTOC offering closely integrated with the ARM (www.arm.com) RealView development environment to facilitate system-level design of complex ARM-based projects.

Tenison EDA, www.tenison.com.

Spiratech, www.spiratech.com.