IKOS Systems is dedicated to providing comprehensive, high-performance
verification solutions for integrated circuit design.  Accordingly we
have developed innovative hardware and software systems, enabling
designers to verify their complex designs in every phase of the
development process.

The co-modeling technology, developed in this context, was donated to
the SCE-API concortium at its founding, and is the basis of the
current SCE-API.  Ikos' interest in donating this technology is to
promote standardized high performance transaction based methodologies
for use with emulation or similar high-performance hardware platforms.

As one of the founding members of the SCE-API consortium, Ikos is
committed to the success of ITC and the SCE-API sub-group.

Ikos strongly believes that connecting software models to emulation
with performance in the 200khz to 10 MHZ range, is an important part
of closing the existing verification gap and of enabling the wide
adoption of high gate-count, complex SoC desings.

The need for highspeed connection between emulation and software
modeling environments is driven by several trends, including
the growing prevalence of high speed architectural models, the
increasing use of some form of executable specification, and the
increasing difficulty of slowdown for emulation target environments.

Ikos believes that the primary initial goals of the ITC group should
be to finish the SCE-API, including the SCE-CI portion, retaining the
emphasis on performance and portability and resulting in a standard
which can be widely adopted by modeling environment vendors including,
but not limited to Verisity, SystemC, transEDA, HDL simulation
vendors, Vera, as well as emulation and hardware-acceleration vendors.

Almost all software models are written in the context of some modeling
environment.  Open standards, usable both directly and by software
modeling environment vendors are the best way to facilitate the
connection of abstract and efficient software models to hardware
accelerated verification platforms.

As SCE-API moves into Accellera, providing an opportunity to broaden
its scope, Ikos would like standards to be a part of expanding the
role of emulation in the both the architectural exploration and
hardware-software verification portions of the design cycle.  The
increasing software content of designs, the variety of architectural
and HW/SW coverification tools and the increasing need for intelligent
architectural trade-offs using real performance information from
legacy IP blocks make these areas fruitful for exploration within a
standards body such as the ITC group.

Finally, within the ITC group, Ikos would like to see greater
participation by and advocacy to the vendors of modeling environments.