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Jay Yantchev
If the customer responses below resonate with you, you may find VWorks has ...
Jay Yantchev
ESL, down under style
Brian Bailey
12/26/2011 11:05 AM EST
I love it when I find out about new companies. It is often difficult for a company to hide too long in this country, but when they are offshore, they can go undetected for quite a long time – especially when their primary customer base is not even in the US. So let’s start with the Australian Semiconductor Technology Company (ASTC Pty Ltd). This is a semiconductor design, software and services company serving the global suppliers and customers of embedded semiconductors. ASTC commenced operations in March 2006 and employs around 100 staff worldwide with headquarters in Adelaide, an engineering center in the Chicago area, an office in Austin, Texas and Japan. So why is that important? Well as so often happens, some great tools emerge from services companies that believe there has to be a better way. And that is what seems to be happening here.
Just the other day, ASTC spun out a new company VWorks that aims to provide new technology and business solutions for electronic system level (ESL) development, modeling, simulation, and virtual prototyping to customers in the industries for aerospace, automotive, transportation, communications, and multimedia embedded electronics and software.
VWorks has a family of products that include VLAB, their primary design platform, Genesis a tool for model creation and OSCAR, a built from the ground up OSCI compliant simulator that they claim can do more and run faster than the reference implementation used by most suppliers of SystemC.
From their company launch documentation, they say “ VWorks products and solutions are based on a foundation of SystemC/TLM industry standards, including IEEE Standard SystemC 1666™-2005, Accellera/OSCI SystemC 2.2 reference implementation, and SystemC TLM 2.0.1, while offering a range of new and powerful value adding capabilities. VWorks is a pioneer in highly portable and interoperable electronic system level technology and solutions. It is dedicated to support an open ecosystem of unencumbered exchange of IP, models and data and unrestricted interoperability between tools. “
I have had some email exchanges with Jay Yantchev the CEO of ASTC. He said that the company was created to meet the needs of customers for better capability and scalability of electronic system level design technology - higher performance, broader application, and better returns. VWorks provides new technology and business alternatives to the state of the art electronic design automation (EDA) industry offerings. Specifically, VWorks seeks to significantly reduce the cost of the enabling electronic system level design technology and tools, reduce the scale and cost of engineering effort required to do electronic system design, and ultimately to significantly improve the ratio between effort or cost of investment in electronic system design and the benefit or return from such investments.
So while VWorks is a new company, the technology and products have been around for a while and in the hands of several of their Japanese, European, and US customers.
So what is different about the business model? Here is their pricing for the SystemC simulator OSCAR
OSCAR distribution access and support are available in terms of 12 months.
Type Register Renew
Commercial
Individual $1000 $500
Enterprise $5000 $2500
Academic
Individual $200 $100
Enterprise $1000 $500
So apart from having to design and verify everything upside down, this may be a very interesting addition to the companies battling it out for ESL tools and flows. For more information check out their website.
Brian Bailey – keeping you covered
If you found this article to be of interest, visit EDA Designline where you will find the latest and greatest design, technology, product, and news articles with regard to all aspects of Electronic Design Automation (EDA).
Also, you can obtain a highlights update delivered directly to your inbox by signing up for the EDA Designline weekly newsletter – just Click Here to request this newsletter using the Manage Newsletters tab (if you aren't already a member you'll be asked to register, but it's free and painless so don't let that stop you [grin]).
Just the other day, ASTC spun out a new company VWorks that aims to provide new technology and business solutions for electronic system level (ESL) development, modeling, simulation, and virtual prototyping to customers in the industries for aerospace, automotive, transportation, communications, and multimedia embedded electronics and software.
VWorks has a family of products that include VLAB, their primary design platform, Genesis a tool for model creation and OSCAR, a built from the ground up OSCI compliant simulator that they claim can do more and run faster than the reference implementation used by most suppliers of SystemC.
From their company launch documentation, they say “ VWorks products and solutions are based on a foundation of SystemC/TLM industry standards, including IEEE Standard SystemC 1666™-2005, Accellera/OSCI SystemC 2.2 reference implementation, and SystemC TLM 2.0.1, while offering a range of new and powerful value adding capabilities. VWorks is a pioneer in highly portable and interoperable electronic system level technology and solutions. It is dedicated to support an open ecosystem of unencumbered exchange of IP, models and data and unrestricted interoperability between tools. “
I have had some email exchanges with Jay Yantchev the CEO of ASTC. He said that the company was created to meet the needs of customers for better capability and scalability of electronic system level design technology - higher performance, broader application, and better returns. VWorks provides new technology and business alternatives to the state of the art electronic design automation (EDA) industry offerings. Specifically, VWorks seeks to significantly reduce the cost of the enabling electronic system level design technology and tools, reduce the scale and cost of engineering effort required to do electronic system design, and ultimately to significantly improve the ratio between effort or cost of investment in electronic system design and the benefit or return from such investments.
So while VWorks is a new company, the technology and products have been around for a while and in the hands of several of their Japanese, European, and US customers.
So what is different about the business model? Here is their pricing for the SystemC simulator OSCAR
OSCAR distribution access and support are available in terms of 12 months.
Type Register Renew
Commercial
Individual $1000 $500
Enterprise $5000 $2500
Academic
Individual $200 $100
Enterprise $1000 $500
So apart from having to design and verify everything upside down, this may be a very interesting addition to the companies battling it out for ESL tools and flows. For more information check out their website.
Brian Bailey – keeping you covered
If you found this article to be of interest, visit EDA Designline where you will find the latest and greatest design, technology, product, and news articles with regard to all aspects of Electronic Design Automation (EDA).
Also, you can obtain a highlights update delivered directly to your inbox by signing up for the EDA Designline weekly newsletter – just Click Here to request this newsletter using the Manage Newsletters tab (if you aren't already a member you'll be asked to register, but it's free and painless so don't let that stop you [grin]).
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Jay Yantchev
1/1/2012 11:43 PM EST
Thank you for taking note of VWorks.
The pricing you mention is for access to the OSCAR simulation library package and for support. There is no run time cost per OSCAR simulator, same as with an OSCI simulator. OSCAR users can run and distribute at no additional cost as many OSCAR simulators as they like. OSCAR offers a commercial grade alternative OSCI simulation library under essentially the same business model.
The OSCI simulation library reference though offers minimal functionality and no development or user tools.
For those who need more than that, we offer VLAB, a new, unique, ‘all in one,’ tool comprising an enhanced version of OSCAR, development tools for the rapid assembly, programming and debug of virtual platforms, and powerful run time tools for the simulation of virtual platforms. VLAB offers a new generation of capabilities and performance, while enabling the VLAB users to build and deploy royalty free, zero run time cost virtual platform simulators, e.g. via the VLAB SIMEXE target platform.
VLAB allows an ‘all in one’ tool concept because the VLAB combination of flexibility, ease of use, ability to rapidly modify at run time a virtual platform, seamless integration between development, debug and run time features and tools, and a scalable cost enables every user to be a virtual platform developer and vice versa. Users can easily, as needed by their use case, as they go, enhance or modify their virtual platform, e.g. add, stub or prototype missing models, add or remove simulation objects which perform various computations, such as assertion checking or power calculations, rewire the system model or change the system test bench, and in general perform all the actions which other tools limit to the province of virtual platform developers and deny to the virtual platform users, thereby drawing unnecessary line between these overlapping groups.
For those interested in finding out more, we suggest to visit VWorks at www.vworks.com.
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Jay Yantchev
1/2/2012 12:22 AM EST
If the customer responses below resonate with you, you may find VWorks has something to offer.
“Our management was until now not interested in ESL. We tried ESL several times, in several of our divisions, with several other tools, but the results were not satisfactory, either technically or business wise. We had given up, until we saw VLAB.”
“My initial feedback is that the combination of VWorks products, VLAB, Genesis, OSCAR, and the VLAB data analysis tools looks like a complete portfolio of tools and features that one would need to create and use a System platform model for Pre-Si software development. Especially, the compliance to standards, and export capabilities for IPXACT & SystemC/OSCI are very useful and are in line with what we need from vendors and partners.“
“After only a couple of days of training we were able to bring up and run our production level 50,000 lines CAN AutoSAR stack and gateway application on a VLAB virtual MCU/ECU platform. It would have taken a week alone to debug a memory corruption bug on the hardware board: we did it on VLAB in a couple of hours, with the help of tracing, hardware breakpoints, and the software debugger. It is amazing that you can trace everything, every platform event, and still go almost fast as if you run a plain simulation without any tracing. This VLAB tool is very useful, it is exactly what we are missing when we debug software on the hardware boards. We are very enthused about the new techniques for debugging embedded software that VLAB enables.”
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