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Venice, Florida — CoWare, Inc, announced the release of a major upgrade to all of its product line supporting companies in their transition from the proof-of-concept ESL era to ESL 2.0. According to this EDA vendor, ESL 2.0 refers to a second generation of ESL solutions, which aim to facilitate the design and development of processor-centric, software-intensive products with complex interconnect and memory architectures, in a production environment.
CoWare support of SystemC as the premier modeling language for ESL shows the company as the leader of small EDA companies in this space. According to the latest market research figures from Gary Smith EDA, it claims an 18% share of the market, just below The Mathworks and a few percentage points below market leader Cadence.
"Due to the rapid convergence of multicore designs, our customers are expanding the use of ESL technologies and methodologies into a production environment and to a wider set of users, including their customers," said Alan Naumann, president and CEO, CoWare. Naumann has proclaimed that such transformation of the behavior of CoWare's customers base is indicative of a new era of ESL, which he defines as ESL 2.0. He defines ESL 2.0 has having the following characteristics:
- The application of ESL technologies and methodologies to a larger community of users including architect and hardware development teams (at the origin of ESL), and now extended to software development, system integration, and test teams.
- The rapid rollout and use of these technologies and methodologies in a production environment.
- The use of virtual hardware platforms by the larger enterprise and its ecosystem through marketing and business development functions.
During my interview with Alan, he compared the transformation of ESL to that of the Web. But to be fair, Web 2.0 is a significantly different tool than the previous Web. The tool has transformed itself from a communication mechanism to a collaboratiion environment, justifying the new moniker. Such transformation is not apparent in the new release of CoWare's tools.
CoWare's proclamation of a new era in the ESL market is based on its marketing strategy targeting platform-based design, and its expectation that such market segment will see strong growth. According to Gary Smith, in his Market Survey of 2007, in a section titled "The Passing of Platform-Based Design" this methodology is rapidly being abandoned by system houses. The fundamental reason is the difficulty they found in customizing the platforms to their intended products. In addition, an analysis of the just released Market Statistics Services from the Electronics Design Automation Consortium (EDAC) shows that the ESL market has sustained little growth in the first two quarters of 2007 compared with the same time frame the previous year.
Richard Goering, in the October issue of the DACeZine, points out that the support for multicore software development is the major issue to be resolved by EDA companies in the ESL market. The new versions of CoWare's products do not specifically address this issue, and thus it is not clear how the company is fundamentally improving its support for multi-core design.
CoWare has demonstrated that it is improving the support of hardware design at the Electronics System Level, and has significantly increased its support for legacy designs through a just signed OEM agreement with Carbon Design Automation. The agreement allows CoWare to improve its support to its customers by enabling them to translate legacy RTL models into SystemC.
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