System Level Design Environment COSIDE®

Electronic System Level Design with COSIDE® by COSEDA Technologies enables our customers to optimize their advanced and complex designs faster, more efficiently and more cost-effectively. ESL Design with COSIDE® leads to success especially when designs have become too large and complex for success at the RTL stage.

COSIDE® is the perfect solution for architectural design exploration, verification, and virtual prototyping at the early stage of the design cycle.

Using COSIDE® right from the start of the design process ensures that complex hardware as well as software systems can handle the required functionality. At the same time, it allows our customers to validate software against hardware even before RTL is implemented. With COSIDE® design teams are able to see the combined impact of architecture on system performance and functionality right from the start of the design process.


About SystemC and SystemC AMS

The language SystemC has been developed to support system level design. It is applied in system-level modeling, architectural exploration, performance modeling, software development and functional verification.

Its analog extension SystemC AMS enables designers to model and simulate particularly complex heterogeneous systems for digital and for analog applications. The SystemC AMS standard is based on technologies we developed within Fraunhofer starting in 2000 in collaboration with several European Semiconductors. As a member of the Accellera SystemC AMS Working Group we have made important contributions to the development of the SystemC AMS extensions. SystemC in combination with C/C++ is typically used to model systems that have both hardware and software content.

Reasons for SystemC AMS in Combination with COSIDE®

  • Improved modeling efficiency and higher model quality
  • Extremely fast simulation
  • Enabling model reuse and extended model (re)use cases of already existing C / C++ libraries
  • Extremely fast verification
  • Improved maintainability combined with a low entry level due to the automation of the design process
  • Multi-functionality: The language covers different levels of abstraction
  • Discovering of critical design failures at an early stage of the development cycle
  • Generation of IP-protected customer models
  • Enabling system analysis and optimization before the availability of real hardware
  • Improves collaboration of SW and HW teams
  • Higher customer satisfaction due to the creation of an executable specification
  • Easy handling of even the largest and most complex models

Motivation for Using COSIDE®

Due to faster data rates, lower power requirements, emerging communication protocols, rapidly evolving standards, increasing memory demands and support of legacy software, today´s design specifications and design tasks are exponentially growing.

To successfully get a product to market on time, design teams must implement the entire product specification within a fixed development schedule. Consequently, system designers depend on Electronic System Level solutions like COSIDE® to meet their requirements on time. To be able to build increasingly sophisticated and ever more complex products, COSIDE® raises the level of abstraction from the register transfer level (RTL) to the system level.

By working with COSIDE® design teams increase flexibility, improve verification and reduce design time. COSIDE® delivers these benefits by enabling advanced methodologies based on SystemC as well as on its analog extension SystemC AMS.

Time and cost reductions combined with a significant increase of quality improvement are the key benefits for users of the SystemC AMS platform COSIDE®. SystemC AMS in combination with COSIDE® is an approach for solving highly complex industrial tasks as well as academic problems.

  • Time to market reduction is a significant competitive advantage over all industries. Parallel development of hard- and software components and the reduction of the simulation time are just two important reasons for using COSIDE®.

  • Cost reduction is achieved as a result of a much shorter development time and, moreover, using COSIDE® only requires a simple PC setup instead of complex physical test equipment.

  • Quality improvement is the result of verification enhancement. The new possibilities of verification of software components, analog/mixed-signal systems and complex hard-/software systems are one of the greatest benefits of COSIDE®.

COSIDE® is the first commercially available design and simulation tool especially made for SystemC as well as for SystemC AMS applications. COSIDE® is a complete eclipse based development platform, available for Linux and Windows.

Based on over 20 years of experience in System Level Design, COSIDE® introduces the most advanced solution developed explicitly to address mixed signal design challenges.