Corporate History

Endeavor was incorporated in 1997 to provide tools and software support for hardware and software designers in the electronic design (EDA) industry.  With their philosophy of conservative growth through self-funding, David N. Glass has built up a highly skilled team of experienced and dedicated engineers with expertise in software process, software design, programming tools, and hardware tools.  This team of problem solvers has focused its primary efforts on processor modeling abstractions, and interfacing them to co-simulation, existing development tools, and co-design. 

Endeavor is in the process of making the transition from a custom engineering company to a product company.  Endeavor has established relationships with its custom development clients that have enabled it to build up a “war chest” of reusable class libraries and kernel technologies, which it has crafted into a number of processor modeling point products.  Endeavor’s efforts with a number of co-verification companies developing processor support packages has given it keen insight into the needs and unique requirements of these customers, as well. 

Being familiar with both the hardware and software development processes puts Endeavor in a useful position to create tools to simplify the practice of designing and verifying products in which the design of the hardware and the writing of software are performed in parallel, thereby shortening its customer’s time to market.

Endeavor has taken advantage of its corporate relationships to gain greater access to the market than many companies its size.  Following a strategy of piggybacking on large customer’s name recognition to gain clout has resulted in combined press releases with Synopsys, DSP Group, and LSI Logic, with more on the way.  Such a strategy has had the desired outcome of gaining the attention of Fortune 500 companies, the class from which most of Endeavor’s customers come.

Management Team

Mr. Glass has successfully collaborated in business previously, forming Performance Computing Inc. in 1989, and selling the company to Smith Micro Software Inc. in 1996.  Performance Computing developed high performance videoconferencing applications, and DSP development tools for an international clientele.

Mr. Glass is Endeavor’s president, and is in charge of sales and marketing for the company.  He has a software development background, specializing in software tools and operating systems.   After 8 years of designing software tools with companies like Intel, Mr. Glass turned his primary efforts towards conceiving new products and their related marketing strategies.   Partnering with Mr. Budge at Performance Computing, the pair combined their strengths, successfully maintaining an edge over much larger companies touting similar video conferencing technology.  This directly led to acquisition interest from companies as Samsung, ATI Technologies, and Smith Micro Software.  Mr. Glass’ 18 years of understanding software tools and industry development needs has been key in setting Endeavor’s strategic direction and course.  Mr. Glass holds a US software patent for video email.

Endeavor’s engineering staff consists of highly skilled and talented engineers.  With no less than 15 years experience per engineer, Endeavor has assembled a team with the industry experience to detect and remove bottlenecks in the design and verification process.  Endeavor prides itself on problem solving, and its staff combines the skill and innovation to produce significant advances in technology.

Endeavor Technology

Endeavor’s focus has been on processor modeling abstractions, and their application in co-design and co-verification. 

Its first point product family is Precyse™, a cycle-precise, high performance processor model that runs at about 400,000 instructions per second.  To accomplish this, Endeavor engineers developed a simulation kernel that is built much like an RTL simulator—complete with timing wheel, pins, busses, and nets—but with innovations and abstractions that enable significant performance improvements over RTL models. 

This IP simulation kernel, called IPSim™, provides the ability to extend a core model with dynamic user plug-ins in two ways.  At the pin and bus level, the IPXtend™ API provides a straightforward interface for co-simulation and peripheral modeling.  In fact, with much of the functionality of a bus interface model built into IPXtend, most co-simulation connections are nearly-trivial pin repeaters.  As a second plug-in method, Endeavor is planning support at a transaction level based on the VSI Alliance’s SLD interface specification.

IPSim also has the ability to simulate multiple processor models, whether they are homogeneous or heterogeneous, without the need for an external connection to a hardware simulator for glue logic.  Not only does IPSim provide for much higher multi-processor performance, but it also flawlessly synchronizes the processors—even if they are in multiple clock domains.  IPSim does this using a streaming clock domain technique designed by Endeavor’s staff.

Endeavor is actively pursuing these and other products that will help system engineers design and verify their hardware and software applications quicker, and at less cost, and at the appropriate level of accuracy for the job.

Endeavor Customers and Partners

Endeavor believes one key to its success lies in the strategic relationships it forges with its customers.  In 1999, Endeavor announced that it was creating an alliance with Synopsys’ Eaglei division to create cycle-accurate processor models for this co-simulation tool builder.  This relationship helped Endeavor establish further relationships with IBM as their developer of choice for PowerPC processor models.  Further, Endeavor’s efforts in developing a ZSP 400 DSP processor support package for Mentor Graphic’s Seamless environment has established Endeavor as one of LSI Logic ZSP Division’s founding Solutions Partners. 

Another key to success is the company’s philosophy to provide open and honest communication with our customers, delivering fully tested and accurate software, and doing so within the customer’s established budget.  This attitude has established Endeavor’s reputation in the industry as a welcome software partner.   All of its current customers—including Analog Devices, its first in 1997—are repeat clients.  Moreover, Endeavor frequently has projects in multiple divisions of large clients, often due to a referral of a satisfied customer within the company.  Endeavor has clients from multiple divisions of Mentor Graphics, LSI Logic, Analog Devices, Synopsys, and Intel.

Endeavor’s partners and customer list includes IBM, ATI Technologies, DSP Group, MetaWare, Texas Instruments and more.