Novel route to personalised processing: News from CoWare

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Corxpert technology is the latest addition to the CoWare Lisatek product family, that automates the path for software developers to develop custom instructions to improve processor performance, creating differentiated products. With Corxpert personality kits for a particular processor - created by CoWare with processor vendors or semiconductor companies - software developers can rapidly develop and explore instructions to improve processor performance for a target application without impacting their time-to-market goals. 'Increasingly, designers are looking at software-driven differentiation'.

'But, by putting all the differentiation in software, they may be compromising product performance'.

'By offering a fast and easy way to extend the processor's instruction set with user defined instructions that optimise specific application-software performance, we enable custom-hardware performance and the programmability benefits of software'.

'It's the best of both worlds', said AK Kalekos, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for CoWare.

Corxpert improves the competitiveness of a product by enabling the best performance versus implementation cost tradeoffs to be made early in the design.

Corxpert gives software developers the ability to easily improve the available performance of their application code.

For a given processor, Corxpert automates the generation of the Instruction Set Simulator (ISS), RTL implementation code and documentation, all from an easy to use graphical user interface (GUI).

The GUI works with existing software tool flows so customers can be productive immediately-able to concentrate on adding performance, not on manual, often error prone tasks.

And with familiar C code to define the instruction behaviour, there is no Hardware Description Language to learn.

High-quality RTL synthesis together with ready to run synthesis scripts allows a direct implementation path, without waiting to hand the design over to the hardware development team.

This means there is no risk of misinterpretation of a paper specification.

Generation of the instruction documentation that is consistent with the ISS models and RTL provides an easy way to communicate the new instructions to other software developers.

And with these consistent models, verification time is reduced drastically compared with manual methods.

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Novel route to personalised processing

Corxpert technology automates the path for software developers to develop custom instructions to improve processor performance, creating differentiated products.