With all of the acquisitions in the virtual prototyping space, a lot of people have been asking me about the ones who are left. One of those is Imperas, which has a combination of technology and models.

On March 3rd, 2008, Imperas made a significant amount of its simulation and virtual prototyping technology public and freely available. This initiative, called Open Virtual Platforms enabled embedded software development to be done on virtual platforms. The technology includes free open source models, documentation on the APIs and a simulator to download. The simulator is free for evaluation and non-commercial usage, but there is now a small charge for usage.

As of January 2010, OVP World has over 2,000 registered users, growing currently at over 150 per month. There are 25+ companies involved to varying degrees, and they have over 400 active companies/entities using the simulation technology - excluding the 20 or so universities that are using the technology for research or education. They have over 40 processor models ranging from NEC controllers used by companies in automotive, such as Audi through to state of the art MIPS quadcore available as free open source for free download - they run from 200-1200MIPS - and there are many platforms for free download, even several using ARM,MIPS running Linux/Nucleus/uClinux. In fact they claim to be in the enviable position that two of our vendor families are verified by the IP provider (MIPS, ARC) - which other vendors cannot claim.

So, why aren’t they better known as a company? It could be because they don’t advertise, or have booths at the EDA trade shows over the past few years. They also have a somewhat strange business model in that they have a significant open-source aspect to their business, something that the EDA world has been slow to adopt (with the exception of SystemC, but the EDA vendors are trying to take that out of the “free” domain).

Imperas is still independent and self funded, and they say they grew last year in terms of staff and revenue, and very importantly with customers funding their success and growth. We shall see if they have any suitors in the foreseeable future.

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Brian Bailey – keeping you covered