Scientists at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories in Camden, N.J., needed a design and development tool to help them craft hardware and software simultaneously in the Defense Department`s Rapid Prototyping of Application-Specific Signal Processors program, better known as RASSP.
They found their solution in the Cosmos environment from Omniview Design Inc. of San Mateo, Calif. Cosmos enables the designer to quickly create and simulate independent hardware and software models in the DOD- and industry-standard VHSIC Hardware Description Language (VHDL), and analyze the system for performance metrics such as latency, throughput, and utilization.
"A number of other tools in this domain tend to use their own proprietary closed-end modeling language and their own simulator, which is very good while you are working in that domain, but what Omniview has done is a significant departure," explains Carl Hein, principle member of the engineering staff at Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology.
"Omniview has a tool based on VHDL, and the language is VHDL, and you can use your choice of simulator vendors as long as that simulator vendor uses VHDL," Hein says. "It has an independent representation for the application software and the hardware - two independent specifications which allows you to play the software on the simulated hardware. Nobody else addresses that explicitly." - J.K.
For more information on Cosmos, contact Charles W. Buenzli Jr., senior vice president of Omniview, by phone at 412-788-9492, by fax at 412-788-0308, by e-mail at [email protected], by mail at 100 High Tower Blvd., Suite 201, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15205, or on the World Wide Web at http://www.omnivw.com/.
