EW Daily News 18/02/2004 09:52:50 - DATE: IBM, STMicro, Infineon start PSL projectDATE: IBM, STMicro, Infineon start PSL project News from ElectronicNews Online
PSL has received a boost from several big-name semiconductor companies and the European Union.
Companies including IBM, Infineon and STMictoelectronics along with the EU have launched a collaborative research effort based on the chipmaking language, aimed at improving the productivity for PSL-based tools and methodologies.
The project, to be known as Prosyd, will be backed by an €7m investment, €4m of which comes from the EU, it was said at the DATE conference in Paris.
The prime deliverable of Prosyd will be a reference methodology and a set of coherent PSL-based tools for property-based system design. Using these tools, the companies who participate in the project aim to demonstrate an improvement of at least 30 per cent in design productivity. In addition, the companies expect to see an increase in the quality of their chips, IBM said.
“Microelectronics technology is advancing so rapidly that present-day systems are now heading towards gate counts of 109,” said Yaron Wolfsthal, senior manager for formal verification and testing technologies at the IBM Haifa lab, in a statement. “With the strong Prosyd team, we’ll be able to alleviate problems in the design flow of such large systems by integrating and unifying the many aspects of system development - including requirement definition, design, implementation and verification.”
The PSL specification language, recently selected by the Accellera EDA standards organization as a basis for an IEEE standard, is based on IBM's Sugar language.
Others participating in the three-year project include the Technical University of Graz in Austria; ITC-IRST in Trento; Verimag in France; the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel; and the Accellera EDA standards organisation.
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