"I'm continually amazed how much time these models save me. Again, I'm really impressed by the quality of your models, your code, your testbenches, and your attention to detail" -Eric Jonas, FMF Model User
Free Model Foundry is the leading third party developer of functional simulation models. These models are distributed to system houses for their design verification, through our extensively used distribution site.
Free Model Foundry, founded in 1995, is dedicated to promoting standard modeling practices within the electrical engineering community while helping IC and IP vendors increase the rate of adoption of their products.
Free Model Foundry promotes the standardization, development, distribution and sharing of functional and timing simulation models for board level components.
As components grow increasingly complex, it is difficult to be sure all aspects of a chip's operations have been accounted for in the board design. FMF understands the needs of design engineers, and has developed open source non-synthesizable behavioral models that simulate the functionality of chips at high levels of abstraction. With FMF models, design engineers can verify that the chips are connected correctly, are being used correctly and are meeting all timing requirements. FMF models are also used in development of FPGA's and ASIC's for verifying the correctness of the chip's interfaces. FMF models are growing in popularity and demand as models for 11,000 parts have been developed and downloaded over a million times annually for board level verification.
Unlike slow, fragile encrypted RTL models which consume too many computer resources during system simulation and may not provide warnings of timing violations and/or protocol errors; FMF functional simulation models written at high levels of abstraction run 10 to 100 times faster during system simulations while being less memory intensive. RTL models must be encrypted differently for each simulator version in marketplace while FMF models are open source and unencumbered with usage licenses and proprietary software.