Back when virtual prototyping was a new thing, the three V’s emerged as the dominant players, Virtio, VaST and Virtutech. Then in May of 2006, Synopsys purchased Virtio and Synopsys because the first of the major EDA players in this space. Things developed very slowly. Mentor then acquired Summit and used some of their technology to create a TLM platform tool. Earlier this week, Synopsys also snapped up VaST, adding to its capabilities and then – even unknown to Paul McLellan – who said that he knew of no merger activity with Virtutech – the last of the 3 V’s was snapped up by Wind River, which is part of Intel.

Wind River will sell and support Virtutech's flagship development platform, Simics, as a stand-alone product and will continue to support all current architectures including ARM, Intel, MIPS and PowerPC. Simics will allow Wind River to offer a market-leading virtual systems development solution in a growing market segment of virtualization and simulation tools for device software development.

"The addition of Virtutech's development platforms to our product line will allow Wind River to offer greater value to customers across the entire product lifecycle and deepen current relationships with our broad set of silicon partners," said Ken Klein, president, Wind River. "Time-to-market remains the single most challenging issue that sophisticated electronic equipment manufacturers need to address and ultimately control in order to remain competitive. With the addition of the Simics products, Wind River adds a key solution to further help customers improve time-to-market, as system complexity and ever more stringent demands upon overall system quality rapidly increase."

"Through our long-standing partnership with Wind River, it became evident that both companies shared a vision of how we can help the electronic systems market rethink how it goes about complex product development by deploying virtual platforms," said John Lambert, CEO, Virtutech. "Time and again, Virtutech has helped customers and partners improve time-to-market by enabling the full sweep of systems development activities to take place on a virtual platform, freeing them up to apply new and innovative ways of running systems development projects. By combining with Wind River, we now have the opportunity to dramatically accelerate the spread of this key market trend and to bring the benefits of virtual platforms to a broader audience."

Simics provides binary-compatible hardware simulations that operate completely within a virtualized environment running on standard laptop or desktop PCs. This strategy allows OEMs to undertake critical software development activities on a virtual platform, independently of any hardware development schedules, semiconductor availability constraints or other limitations. This also allows semiconductor manufacturers to redefine complex system-on-chip development with greater ecosystem support and customer engagement. Virtutech therefore enables customers to manage complexity, drive improved quality and achieve higher productivity, all while lowering capital expenditure and shortening total development time.

So there you have it. The only independent supplier of this technology is now CoWare and one of the big EDA suppliers has yet to show a presence in this market. It was only a few years back that Cadence turned some of their DSP and ESL software over to CoWare – maybe the time is getting right for them to take it back.

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Brian Bailey – keeping you covered