There's really no getting around it.
The complexity of today's chip
designs will eventually force you to adopt hardware-assisted verification in
some form. Software simulation alone is
too slow. Meanwhile, functional verification remains Public Enemy #1 in the
design community.
Mentor Graphics, which has a long history in the hardware-assisted verification
arena, has made its latest splash with
the Veloce family of systems. Available in
three initial configurations, the Veloce
simulation accelerators and/or in-circuit
emulators (ICEs) combine the fast runtime speeds and model accuracy of
FPGA-based hardware-assisted verification systems with the simulation-like
debug and very fast compilation of systems based on custom ASICs.
The heart of the Veloce systems' hardware architecture is a custom ASIC built
on a 90-nm process. The chip includes
500 kbits of dual data-rate trace memory as well as a built-in debug engine.
According to the company, this results in
simulation-like debugging during acceleration as well as during ICE, with visibility
into every RTL signal during the entire duration of the test. A trace-compression
engine also built into the ASIC provides
efficient transport of debug data from
the Veloce system to a workstation or PC
for analysis.
For design-team-level acceleration and
emulation, the Veloce Trio-24/48 and
Veloce Solo systems accommodate
three users and one user, respectively,
with systems intended for use in data
centers. Veloce Solo is a personal system that can sit under a designer's desk
(). Veloce Quattro is an
enterprise-class system for large
designs. Shared by up to four users, it's
intended as a lab unit.
A standout specification for the
Veloce family is runtime speed. As an
accelerator, the systems run at over 1
MHz. As ICEs, they've been clocked at
up to 1.5 MHz. That translates into
faster turnaround times and can mean
the ability to compile a design multiple
times in a single day.
The Veloce hardware-assisted verification systems are available now. Contact
Mentor Graphics directly for pricing.
Mentor Graphics
www.mentor.com