EDA firm CoWare has been boosted by signing a deal for its tools to link with IMEC’s software defined radio programme. CoWare’s ConvergenSC tool will be used as part of a hardware/software co-design system.

"Right now we’re moving into an era where system-on-chip contains tens or hundreds of processors, and this is how you design your system," Rudy Lauwereins, a v-p at IMEC, told Electronics Weekly.

"The letter of intent with CoWare is to make sure research tools and commercial tools fit together," said Lauwereins.

IMEC’s M4 programme aims to develop a software defined radio for both the baseband and front-end of mobile handsets and for multi-format multimedia codecs.

Commercial products are expected by 2009, and the first strategic partner on the project is Samsung. Other mobile handset makers are expected to join the programme in the future.

Alan Naumann, president and CEO of CoWare, said: "We’ll get some extensions to our capabilities. Wireless is where some of the key research is going on in the consumer space."

CoWare, which was itself spun-out of IMEC some five years ago, has made significant gains in recent years. With growth last year of 55 per cent, it has become a top ten EDA firm. Naumann claimed it is now the sixth largest EDA company.

"CoWare has started to be more aggressive," Naumann told EW at the DATE show this week. "We expect to keep growing at the same rate this year – organic growth of more than 50 per cent."

He said CoWare reached profit on a quarterly basis for the first time last year, so further funding is not required. "We plan to go public, but we’re not rushing to it," he said.

www.coware.com
www.imec.be