In order to support a virtual platform these days you have to have an OSCI TLM 2.0 interface. Ever since this standard was announced, less than two years ago, it has gotten to the point of totally dominating the space and has replaced all proprietary interfaces that had existed before then.  Today EVE has announced that their ZeBu emulation platforms will support OSCI TLM 2.0 interface standard through a TLM-2.0 transactor adapter. 

This enables the creation of hybrid virtual platforms that combine SystemC and register transfer level (RTL) models, in a scalable, accurate and flexible manner, bridging the gap between software modeling and hardware implementation.

At the same time, this fills a big gap in the Synopsys prototyping strategy. They have virtual platforms, physical prototype through HAPS, and the ability to include FPGA based execution, but no emulator in their product line-up. Could this be the start of Synopsys making an acquisition for EVE? Synopsys has tried to get into the emulation market before, most notably when they tried to acquire IKOS, but Mentor decided that they wanted it more and took it out from under their feet. And Synopsys even tried to develop their own even further back in the past.

"The efficient debugging and analysis capabilities available with virtual prototypes enable software developers to start their work much earlier in the development cycle," says Frank Schirrmeister, Synopsys director of marketing for system-level solutions.  "With our support of standards-based SystemC TLM-2.0 integrations with fast RTL emulation environments such as EVE ZeBu, Synopsys virtual prototyping products can extend the benefits of system-level visibility to development teams for hardware-software co-verification."

"Adding support for TLM-2.0 gives software developers and hardware verification teams an interoperable way to easily map their SoC development environments to our emulators," remarks Lauro Rizzatti, EVE-USA's general manager and vice president of marketing.  "It ties both ESL virtual platforms and simulation environments more closely to ZeBu and to each other, providing a standards-based methodology to reuse components for software development, hardware verification and hardware/software co-verification."

The TLM-2.0 transactor adapter is compatible with the OSCI TLM-2.0 standard, supporting multiple targets and initiators, blocking and non-blocking transport interfaces, and the Loosely Timed (LT), Loosely Timed Temporal Decoupled (LTD) and Approximately-Timed (AT) coding styles. 

At the system level, users can integrate the TLM-2.0 transactor adapter with Electronic System Level (ESL) virtual platforms, as well as with advanced SystemVerilog hardware verification environments.  At the emulator level, the ZeBu TLM-2.0 transactor adapter is an open architecture that enables interoperability with other ZeBu transactors, either from EVE's transactor catalog or created using ZEMI-3.

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Brian Bailey – keeping you covered