Carbon Design Systems helps carbon-based life forms design chips made of silicon and other elements. The company started out marketing point tools and has since moved on to a more integrated approach with its Carbon SoC product. Carbon SoC can accept transaction-level models generated by tools from other vendors, such as ARM, CoWare, and VaST. These software models accelerate the pre-silicon functional validation of system software and hardware. Carbon Design Systems has received about $15 million in private funding from such investors as Commonwealth Capital, Flagship Ventures, and Matrix Partners. Samsung invested $4 million in the company in 2012.