Carbon Design Systems

About Carbon Design Systems

Carbon Design Systems, founded in 2002, established itself as a key player in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) sector, specializing in system validation software for complex System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designs. The company provided crucial tools for architectural analysis and pre-silicon hardware and software validation, enabling developers to test and debug their designs before committing to the costly process of silicon fabrication.

The firm's product suite was centered around creating highly accurate software models directly from the hardware's Register Transfer Level (RTL) code. This allowed software, such as drivers and firmware, to run on a 'virtual' hardware model at significant speeds, facilitating early-stage validation. Key offerings included SoC Designer Plus, a platform for developing and executing virtual system prototypes, and Carbon Model Studio, a service for automatically generating these hardware-accurate software models. This technology was vital for evaluating performance and power consumption in the initial phases of SoC design.

A significant milestone in the company's history was the 2008 agreement with ARM, under which Carbon took over the development, support, and sales of ARM's SoC Designer tool. As part of this deal, key members of ARM's development team joined Carbon, and Carbon gained access to ARM's intellectual property to optimize its model-generation tools for ARM processors. This strategic relationship solidified Carbon's position in the ecosystem, as a majority of its customers were already utilizing ARM IP in their SoC designs.

This journey culminated in October 2015, when ARM Holdings acquired the assets and product portfolio of Carbon Design Systems for an undisclosed sum. The entire Carbon staff was transferred to ARM, effectively re-integrating the technology and expertise back into the ARM ecosystem. The acquisition was driven by ARM's strategy to provide its partners with earlier access to cycle-accurate models for future ARM processors, thereby shortening time-to-market and improving design optimization for the world's leading semiconductor vendors.