Date: 26/01/2010

Hardware-assisted solution from Mentor for accelerated verification of USB 2.0 devices

Mentor Graphics has released a new hardware-assisted solution to accelerate the verification of Universal Serial Bus (USB) 2.0 devices. This new solution enables to test the System-on-Chip (SoC) design that controls a hard disk drive and similar mass storage device, by providing an accurate, hardware-based model of the real disk drive connected to their SoC.

Combined with the Veloce emulation family, the iSolve USB peripheral device delivers a high-performance and easy-to-use system verification environment to develop new SoCs containing a USB host controller, without compromising delivery schedules. The new product adds to the existing iSolve family of solutions for the accelerated verification of applications such as multimedia, networking, embedded systems, wireless, and storage devices.

The key features of the combined solution are,

Productive debug environment provides access to low-level transactions to detect those hard-to-find bugs
High-speed data accesses allows loading or unloading of GBytes of data in minutes rather than hours
Compliant to USB 2.0 standard

The iSolve USB peripheral solution can be used with in-circuit emulation (ICE), high-performance, and transaction-based acceleration mode of operation. The ability to mix and match ICE capabilities with high-performance transaction-based acceleration facilitates the smooth transition from a simulation-centric use model to in-circuit emulation.

"New consumer products, in particular, are increasingly dependent on the use of the latest-generation USB devices, and design engineers are concerned with the quick and efficient verification of their SoC designs that will connect to these devices," said Jim Kenney, director of marketing, Mentor's Emulation Division. "We took a new approach to solve these challenges with our iSolve USB Peripheral product, by providing a flexible, easy-to-use, and highly-configurable USB peripheral device model. This gives our customers the ability to verify multiple configurations and descriptions of USB peripheral devices all with the same emulator solution rather than needing many specific devices."

The solution is available for deployment at customer sites effective immediately.

For more details visit www.mentor.com