Press Coverage

This page contains the text of press articles. As of yet, it is not linked in. Links are used on the PublicDocuments page instead, but I am afraid that someone may take down an article.

IBM, STMicro, Infineon Start PSL Project

Online staff -- Electronic News, 2/17/2004

PSL got a boost today with the help of several big-name semiconductor companies and the European Union.

Advertisement 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 $8.7 million (7 million euro) investment, $5.13 million (4 million euros) 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 percent 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 organization.

-- RoderickBloem - 11 Mar 2004