Date: 16/05/2012

New in-circuit acceleration feature in Cadence tools to speed-up SoC verification

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. has announced a new in-circuit acceleration based on the Incisive and Palladium XP platforms for the company's System Development Suite, and extensions to the Verification IP Catalog for acceleration and emulation to give engineers the ability to go beyond simulation to speed verification of large-scale SoCs, sub-systems and systems.

"The inefficiencies and performance limitations introduced by traditionally disconnected development platforms combined with verification IP applicability being limited to simulation-only approaches are posing a threat to customers designing systems and SoCs for consumer and wireless electronics being able to deliver products on time," said Nimish Modi, senior vice president, system and software realization group at Cadence. "With the new in-circuit acceleration deliverables in the System Development Suite and the extension our Verification IP Catalog to acceleration and emulation, Cadence is taking another significant step forward towards its vision to enable open, connected and scalable system-level development."

In-circuit acceleration added to System Development Suite (SDS)
The effort and cost associated with utilizing different, disconnected engines for virtual prototyping, RTL simulation, acceleration, emulation, and FPGA-based prototyping pose key challenges to delivering products on time. Cadence offers as part of the System Development Suite a single heterogeneous environment for system-level verification based on the Incisive and Palladium XP platforms. This enables designers to leverage both the high speed and real-world interfaces of traditional in-circuit emulation environments combined with the advanced analysis capabilities available in RTL simulation. Design teams are no longer forced to create and maintain both environments, spend unnecessary time and effort to reproduce bugs, or remodel all system components targeted for one environment.

New in-circuit acceleration enables teams for simulation acceleration and emulation to deploy a common unified verification environment, resulting in up-to-10x increased efficiency during system-level validation and root cause analysis.

Verification IP (VIP) Catalog expanded for acceleration and emulation
Universal Verification Model (UVM)-compatible Accelerated VIP enables users to smoothly transition from simulation to acceleration, in-circuit acceleration, and in-circuit emulation, giving them the ability to verify complex Systems and SoCs that are too large for verification using traditional RTL simulation.

The Cadence VIP catalog now includes Accelerated VIP for the following interface standards: ARM's AMBA AXI 3/4 and ACE, PCI Express 2.0/3.0, USB 3.0, 10Gb Ethernet, SATA 3, and HDMI 1.4.