It's now the rule rather than the exception: Logic designers must accept responsibility for verification. But time is short, so it behooves EDA vendors to enhance verification productivity. In the latest improvements to its Logic Design Team (LDT) portfolio of verification tools, Cadence addresses three key bottlenecks that hamper productivity (see the figure).
Cadence has beefed up the formal engine in its Incisive Formal Verifier, providing a 5 × to 50 × gain in both speed and capacity. The LDT flow is now better positioned to enable designers to adopt standard assertion languages. A second improvement is in the LDT portfolio's ties to hardware simulation acceleration. The functional blocks that designers are responsible for are becoming large enough for acceleration to be helpful. Designers find themselves using constrained-random, coverage-driven testbenches on their million-plus-gate blocks.
Cadence's answer is a "hot-swap" capability between its Xtreme hardware accelerator and the Incisive Simulator. A seamless interface between the simulator and the hardware accelerator lets users switch between them in seconds. Now, 100 million clock cycles take 11.5 days on the simulator but just 2.4 minutes on the Xtreme accelerator.
Lastly, Cadence has addressed the amount of time it takes to set up an assertion-based verification environment. Packages of verification IP (VIP) are available for the AMBA AHB and AXI protocols as well as the Open Core Protocol.
The LDT verification portfolio is available now. Contact Cadence for pricing.
Cadence Design Systems
www.cadence.com