What EDA vendors are saying about NEC Electronics' initiative in the system integration arena, code-named ACE-2

• Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
  Stanley Krolikoski, group director marketing, system level design

  "NEC Electronics' ACE-2 initiative marks an important milestone in providing a new design infrastructure to increase productivity for SOC design. There was a remarkably good fit between the ACE-2 objectives and the capabilities of the Cadence Cierto^TM Virtual Component Co-Design environment (VCC). With ACE-2, designers can perform trade-off considerations using VCC along function and architecture lines and between HW and SW at the earliest decision point in the design flow."

• CARDTools Systems Corporation
  Joseph Rothman, president and chief executive officer

  "The ACE-2 program represents the latest in state-of-the-art tools for today's and tomorrow's SOC design methodology needs and we are proud to be a critical part of this program. Any digital system design is heavily dependent on software and the overall architecture. NitroVP^TM technology was chosen because it represents the best co-design technology addressing these needs. Only the NitroVP^TM environment has the capability to address high-speed SOC simulations for software timing and functional verification."

  NitroVP^TM is a trademark of CARDtools Systems Corporation.

• CoWare, Inc
  Guido Arnout, president and chief executive officer

• "NEC Electronics has shown a strong commitment to reducing SOC turnaround time by working with CoWare to integrate an important processor into the CoWare N2C environment. We are looking forward to the next phase of this project, where designers can take full advantage of our Interface Synthesis capabilities to automate the time-consuming tasks of generating the hardware glue logic and software drivers associated with this processor."

• Mentor Graphics
  Michael Kaskowitz, vice president and executive sponsor of SOC flow solutions

  "Mentor is pleased to be a key technology contributor to the ACE-2 initiative at NEC Electronics. Reducing the engineering effort required to realize complex designs is critical to making system-on-a-chip a viable technology platform. Mentor is focused on providing IP, tools and solutions that ease the task of SOC verification and design, and these form an integral part of the solution encompassed by the ACE-2 initiative."

• Synopsys, Inc
  Chi-Foon Chan, president and chief operating officer

  "It has been very exciting to work with NEC Electronics during this first phase of the ACE-2 project -- integrating Synopsys' IP modeling and software verification tools and methodologies into NEC's new design flow. The significant reduction in design cycle time we have achieved so far is very encouraging. We look forward to working with NEC to integrate recently developed technologies into the second phase of the ACE-2 project to achieve the overall project goals and benefit mutual customers."

• Synplicity, Inc.
  Andy Haines, vice president of marketing

  "Synplicity shares NEC Electronics' goal of substantially improving time to market for SOC ASIC designs through early and robust functional verification. By using the Certify^TM ASIC prototyping tool with the ACE-2 methodology, NEC Electronics' customers can functionally validate SOC designs in hardware directly from RTL code."

• Tera Systems
  Richard Gordon, executive vice president and founder

  "The integration of our TeraForm RTL design planner into the ACE-2 flow benefits both NEC Electronics' design centers and their ASIC design customers. With TeraForm, ASIC designers now can create and analyze a silicon virtual prototype as they write their RTL and use the timing and physical constraints output by TeraForm to guide back-end tools to timing convergence without iterations. This cuts months out of the design cycle, helps designers achieve higher-quality results and paves the way to a next-generation RTL-signoff methodology."

• Verisity Design, Inc
  Moshe Gavrielov, chief executive officer

  "NEC Electronics' charter to define a new methodology that will reduce creation time for SOCs is a significant undertaking. As verification is the single largest bottleneck in the flow, NEC Electronics needed an advanced tool capable of significantly enhancing engineers' productivity. Specman Elite is the market-leading solution for RTL verification and provides an advanced, proven technology. We are delighted to work with NEC Electronics on this aspect of the flow and are committed to advancing this effort."