Oxford, UK, 20 April 2010 – RS Components today announced that it has signed a partnership with ARM to strengthen its Embedded Development Platform (EDP) product line by incorporating microprocessors featured in ARM’s new mbed program. The enhancement sees the introduction of an mbed module that provides a fast and simple prototype and test route for new designs.

RS EDP enables the rapid prototyping and proof-of-concept of embedded systems. It comprises reusable, reconfigurable Personality and Application Modules, developed in-house to provide a variety of processing and I/O functions. Following the partnership with ARM, RS will offer an mbed module for EDP allowing engineers to move, build and test their mbed designs quickly and easily in a hardware environment. RS is planning to introduce further new modules for EDP and will use the platform as a key element in a major initiative to partner with universities and offer them cost-effective and powerful teaching aids.

“EDP offers designers a fast way to develop electronic products,” said Mark Cundle, Technical Marketing Manager, RS Components. “Its flexibility and configurability offers an almost unlimited palette of possibilities for engineers to quickly develop very sophisticated concepts.”

One of the major strengths of EDP is that it allows engineers to experiment with processors from competitive vendors on a common platform. This means the time and effort saved in building a prototype can be used developing an application. With a growing portfolio of Personality and Application Modules – all of which interoperate seamlessly on the EDP baseboard – engineers finally have a rapid prototyping platform that meets their needs.

The EDP baseboard and modules have been developed by RS to provide the reliability, affordability and flexibility needed in modern electronic products. Each PCB meets stringent signal integrity specifications to ensure reliable operation. The components used are all well established and manufactured by leading vendors including Infineon, NXP, Microchip and ST Microelectronics. Each module conforms to the EDP standard and can be fitted in any position, in any combination, in the two- or four-slotted EDP baseboards.

About RS Components

RS Components is the trading brand of Electrocomponents plc, one of the largest global catalogue and web-based distributor of Electronic, Electro-mechanical and Industrial components. The Group serves nearly 1.6 million customers worldwide. Through operations in 27 countries and 17 warehouses, RS distributes 500,000 products from over 2,500 suppliers. The Group has an annual turnover of over £974 million and is listed on the London Stock Exchange. For more details on the Group please visit the corporate website (www.electrocomponents.com).

Austin, Texas, April 20, 2010– Zocalo Tech, Inc., an Electronic Design Automation (EDA) company focused on Assertion-Based Verification (ABV) productivity software, today announced that it has added four new capabilities to its Zazz™ product family: Zazz Bird Dog, Zazz Metrics, Zazz Visual SVA and user-defined assertion library support.

The new options simplify and support the adoption of an ABV methodology to improve electronic design and Intellectual Property (IP) quality and increase verification productivity.

What’s New

•  Zazz Bird Dog analyzes the design and rank orders the most important candidate signals where assertions should be added. For legacy code, performing a manual assessment of assertion requirements for a complex functional block can take days versus minutes with Bird Dog.
• Zazz Metrics provide the project team with an on-going progress report about the quantity and quality of the assertions added versus the target. Historical reports on completed functional blocks provide a baseline for measuring the value of using assertions to reduce debug time.
• Zazz Visual SVA provides the ability to create and debug all levels of assertion complexity  without learning the SVA language. Visual SVA completely eliminates the long learning time typically associated with becoming proficient writing properties with the SVA language. Visual SVA also provides dynamic controllability of assertions,  automatic bind file management and documentation.
• Zazz Assertion Library Support makes using assertion libraries fast and easy while providing automatic bind file management and documentation. In addition to supporting OVL and libraries from the major EDA vendors, user-defined assertion libraries can now be added to Zazz.

“Zazz addresses the major issues that have kept ABV from wide scale acceptance: Where do I add assertions? What is the cost for adding assertions? How do I cost effectively move from an ad hoc use of simple assertions to the systematic use of more complex and temporal assertions ?” said Khalil Shalish, CTO of Zocalo Tech. “Bird Dog identifies the most useful  placement of assertions and allows the project to scope the level of work for adequately populating a design with assertions. Visual SVA enables the use of more useful and powerful SVAs at all levels of complexity via an easy to learn intuitive process. Assertion debug is provided on an automated interactive basis.  This frees the user to focus on describing the intent of the design rather than the complexities of the SVA language.” 

Zocalo at DAC

Zocalo will demonstrate Zazz and its new capabilities for the first time at the IC Design Central Partner Pavilion, Booth #1509, at the Design Automation Conference (DAC), June 14-16, 2010 in Anaheim, California. To see a Zazz demonstration, please email info@zocalo-tech.com.

Availability

Zazz Bird Dog, Zazz Metrics and Zazz Assertion Library Support are available now. Zazz Visual SVA will be available in October. Contact Zocalo Tech for pricing info@zocalo-tech.com.

About Zocalo Tech, Inc.

Zocalo Tech, Inc., incorporated in 2006, is focused on productivity software for quick and easy creation, use and reuse of assertions that work with popular functional verification flows. Zocalo software, marketed under the name Zazz, has been architected and developed from the ground up with one goal in mind: increased productivity for engineers adopting and utilizing Assertion-Based Verification. For more information, please visit www.zocalo-tech.com.

BEDFORD, MA – April 20, 2010 – GateRocket, Inc., the leading supplier of verification and debug solutions for advanced FPGAs, today announced that Qualcomm, Incorporated (Nasdaq: QCOM), has adopted its RocketDrive® and RocketVision® products to address the increasing complexity of the FPGAs and ASICs its engineering teams are developing.

Qualcomm adopted GateRocket after a comprehensive internal evaluation of the product’s capabilities, particularly in the area of simulation acceleration. Initial evaluations resulted in improvements of 2-11X with limited impact on their existing verification flows. The company uses FPGAs extensively in prototyping large ASIC designs which often requires many FPGAs to be used as a prototyping platform. Performing long serial test sequences for such large-scale designs can run for days and are difficult to partition into smaller design portions. Design teams will use the GateRocket products on their FPGA prototypes as a way to more efficiently verify and debug internally developed IP, as well as system-level designs that will ultimately be implemented as ASICs.

“We’re expecting GateRocket to help us streamline the verification process by accelerating logic simulation for the FPGAs and reducing the number of errors we find in the lab, all without disrupting our current design flow,” said Steve LoCicero, Senior Director of Engineering at Qualcomm. “The result is a much more efficient verification process for FPGA designs. We are pleased with the design cycle reductions made possible by GateRocket, and their support team has been extremely responsive in helping us adopt this approach.

A Streamlined, Interactive Verification Process

Qualcomm can achieve silicon-level accuracy through the RocketDrive verification system which allows them to simulate their designs within the context of the FPGA device they are using. RocketDrive works seamlessly with Qualcomm’s functional verification environment, and allows designers to move effortlessly between RTL and the FPGA being targeted, combining actual FPGA hardware and RTL simulation models in the same verification run. This technique provides engineers with the ability to make a change to one RTL block and re-run it along with the hardware representations of the other blocks, thereby avoiding the need to rebuild the FPGA for each fix and enabling multiple design-change-debug iterations in a single day

About GateRocket

GateRocket, Inc., located in Bedford, Mass., offers electronic engineers the first Device Native^® verification and debug solution for advanced FPGA semiconductor devices. The company’s RocketVision® software debug tool and its RocketDrive hardware verification system enables users to verify and debug advanced FPGA designs faster and with higher quality for greatly improved time-to-market, and realize more reliable and predictable results. Learn more about GateRocket online at www.gaterocket.com and sign up for a free webinar.