However, while IMEC (officially, the Interuniversities Microelectronics Center) is keen to see Ocapi commercialized, the design tool is incompatible with the class library structure being promoted by the Open SystemC initiative as an industry standard. That could prevent Ocapi's early deployment, said Guido Arnout, president and chief executive officer of CoWare (Santa Clara, Calif.).

CoWare is one of the companies driving the SystemC initiative, and Arnout said no decision has yet been made about how CoWare will use Ocapi, the technologies behind it or other EDA technologies developed at IMEC.

"Ocapi is for hardware design only and we need to develop solutions in the hardware-software world," said Arnout. "Also, Ocapi has a proprietary class library and I have suggested to the IMEC researchers that they change that to SystemC."

Ocapi is heavily object oriented and uses a class library system to allow architectural design in C/C++. It features incremental refinement of behavior and data types, automatic translation of code to VHDL at the register-transfer level for conventional synthesis, and automatic generation of testbenches and test vectors for the RT VHDL. One of the big advantages the software claims is to allow many facets of architectural design to be done in a single, consistent environment.

"CoWare has a contract, which allows them to have access to the code for development and commercial use," said Ivo Bolsens, IMEC vice president and director of its design technology division. Bolsens said he looked forward to the commercialization of Ocapi, which has been in development at IMEC since about 1995.

"It is a nonexclusive deal with CoWare so we could give others access," he said. "Right now Ocapi can be used by EDA champions within a company. But if we want it to be adopted more widely it needs a lot of additional work — uniform GUIs, libraries, documentation and so on. We do have a number of early adopters including Alcatel, National Semiconductor, Ericsson and Sony."

Refine time

It seems unlikely that CoWare will try to support Ocapi as it stands. Instead the company may refine the base technology and adapt it to its own established EDA tools, such as N2C. These tools were also the result of a technology transfer from an earlier design research initiative at IMEC.

"It's a broad technology deal we've done with IMEC," said CoWare's Arnout. "It gives us rights to take their work and look where it complements our own. But we have not made up our minds on any particular EDA software."

Arnout said Ocapi as currently configured could be blocked from entering the market because "the SystemC announcement has changed the environment. It [Ocapi] takes the object-oriented paradigm a long way further forward and the market may not be ready for that," he said. "We will have to look at the technology, the market and customers' opinions before we make a decision on when to release it, if at all."