When companies acquire other companies, part of the buzz consists of speculation about what will happen. Did the acquiring company simply remove a competitor from the market? Will business continue as usual? Will the technology be repurposed?

Last year, Synopsys went on a buying spree, and a couple days ago they announced the results of the combined inputs of Virtio, VAST, and CoWare, not to mention their own efforts on top of that, in their new Virtualizer product.

This tool is intended both for creating virtual prototypes and then using them in a verification flow, connected to VCS, their HAPS systems, EVE’s ZeBu emulators, software development tools, and higher-level system modeling tools like Simulink and Saber.

Their emphasis in the combined technologies is on debug and analysis capabilities. The debug applies both to the creation phase and the use phase; analysis is particular useful in the use phase for tracking down not just bugs, but also performance issues.

They’ve also tried to hide the lower-level SystemC constructs during the creation phase: they see the users as familiar with SystemC, but wanting a higher-level view to help narrow down issues, after which they can delve into the detailed code.

During software debug, the tool allows hardware-aware analysis, like viewing power as the software executes and running different hardware scenarios.

They have a particular emphasis on automotive, wireless, and consumer systems, with ARM getting some extra focus, but not to the exclusion of other processor cores.

More info can be found in their release…