The first fruits of EVE's acquisition earlier this year of Tharas Systems is the ZeBu-AX next-generation hardware accelerator. Designed for ease of use, it offers close to unlimited capacity as well as plug-and-play, event-accurate mixed-language simulation acceleration.
The system provides scalable capacity of up to 512 million ASIC gates. Its one-pass compilation executes at 125 million ASIC gates/hour on a single workstation, mapping onto the accelerator the design under test and a significant portion of the behavioral testbench. The fully automatic process doesn't require user intervention.
The accelerator can be used either in an iterative, design-debug mode or in the regression-testing phase of the project cycle. Hardware is implemented as a very-long-instruction-word (VLIW) machine that executes multiple hardware description language (HDL) operations in a single cycle. This machine is controlled by a sequencer that can execute test/branch/run/loop operations for conditional control. ZeBu-AX takes HDL descriptions and generates code for the sequencer and VLIW machine.
Its single-kernel runtime environment works in co-simulation with the Synopsys VCS, Mentor Graphics QuestaSim, or Cadence NC-Sim simulators. It accelerates simulation from 10 to 1000 times faster than any HDL simulator. ZeBu-AX can manage especially large designs that are typical of graphics and processor designs that most HDL simulators cannot support.
ZeBu-AX supports the RedHat and Suse Linux platforms as well as the VCS, NC-Sim, and ModelSim software simulators. Pricing starts at $100,000.