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 is concerned with conversion of models of circuit blocks between levels of abstraction in a system-level design environment. In system-level design, Tenison says, you need to be able to design with mixed tools and at multiple levels of abstraction. The company says that in a typical design, 80% of pre-existing intellectual property (IP) will be in RTL. At the same time, logic errors are still the dominant cause of design failure. You won't re-write that RTL, and trying to write a model of it is a highly error-prone process. VTOC provides the ability to move models between levels of abstraction. To that capability the company adds the facility, from the Spiratech software, of automatically generating "transactors"—high-performance transaction-level interfaces to those models. Cohesive allows the user to formally specify an interface using a specialised language, that is then compiled to generate the transactor. Once the user has carried out that formal specification, the software can create a bridge between any two levels of abstraction. Users can verify their design's conformance to a protocol by entering a description of the latter. So, VTOC will convert your RTL to SystemC, and Cohesive will create a transactional interface to it. Tenison's CTO Jeremy Bennett says, "The ability to connect between models at different levels of abstraction is a cornerstone of any practical ESL solution," while Spiratech's CEO Simon Calder adds, "There are no excuses left for not adopting an ESL methodology—this tool combination makes connection of transaction-level models to the existing design and verification-tool flow very much easier."

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

Tenison EDA, www.tenison.com.