March 27, 2006 -- CoWare, Inc. has announced its new Virtual Platform product family that will enable the company to expand into the software development market. The CoWare Virtual Platform product family delivers new tools and technologies that support the creation, distribution, and use of virtual hardware platforms for device software development and validation. Virtual hardware platforms are models of the device hardware and the environment they evolve in, and are suitable for the development and validation of an entire device software stack up to the application level. The solution is integrated with and supports the CoWare platform-driven ESL strategy.

As CoWare points out, traditional software development and validation solutions have either been non-representative of the device hardware, too slow, available too late, or have not provided enough hardware controllability and observability. Virtual hardware platforms provide fast execution speed, scalability, early availability, unprecedented hardware controllability, observability, determinism, and easy distribution. By using virtual hardware platforms, software developers and development teams can reap the benefits of an earlier start to device software development and validation, improved productivity, and lower development costs.

"CoWare Virtual Platform provides an innovative solution for validating embedded device software before the target hardware is available," said Matt Volckmann, Senior Embedded Software Analyst at Venture Development Corporation, Natick, Mass. "This new solution puts CoWare into a position to directly support the device software development process and deliver value to semiconductor companies and device manufacturers."

The CoWare Virtual Platform family includes:

CoWare Virtual Platform Designer: the first virtual hardware platform creation environment based on SystemC includes a graphical modeling and high performance SystemC environment, an Eclipse-based SystemC IDE, and automated virtual platform software package generation. CoWare Virtual Platform: the self-contained, distributable virtual platform software package generated by the CoWare Virtual Platform Designer, includes the executable virtual platform model, the software tools to leverage the unique capability of the virtual platform, and the scripting and application programming interface to integrate the virtual platform in the software development and validation environment.

Pricing and Availability

CoWare Virtual Platform product family is available today.