ProDesign's CHIPit Supports Transaction Based Verification; CHIPit Prototyping Systems + SCE-MI Standard Interface for Transaction Based Verification Dramatically Accelerates Functional Verification of ASIC Designs

Business Wire, May 22, 2006

BRUCKMUEHL, Germany & SAN JOSE, Calif. -- ProDesign, a leading supplier of ASIC and SoC verification platforms, today announced the availability of a SCE-MI based interface for transaction based verification for its successful CHIPit ASIC prototyping product line.

Due to the increasing complexity and sizes of ASIC/SoC designs, verification has become one of the most challenging tasks design and verification engineers face today. For large designs, simulator performance rapidly decreases. The simulation performance drops to 1-10 Hz precisely at the point in the verification process that requires millions of clock cycles to adequately test and verify software functionality.

At such rates, software debug would take several months. Simulation accelerators or standard hardware emulators can accelerate the speed from 80 KHz up to 2 MHz at best and thereby significantly cut the verification time compared to pure simulation. However, the performance that is achieved with such machines in most cases is still inadequate to develop and verify firmware and software that require speeds between 1 and 20 MHz. To reach such a speed, new verification methodologies like Transaction Based Verification can be used.

"By combining our CHIPit high-speed prototyping systems with an SCE-MI interface, ProDesign offers a solution on the transaction-based level which increases verification performance up to in-circuit speed (10 to 150 MHz) and reduces the time-to-market dramatically," said Gunnar Scholl, Director Marketing and Business Development at ProDesign.

"Most co-emulation verification environments have been event-based, which means they have to provide data on every clock cycle or even every sub-cycle. This event-based mechanism is responsible for speed decrease in the co-simulation mode and allows a maximum speed in the kHz region. In contrast, the transaction-based verification mode accelerates the verification by allowing large amounts of data representing single or multiple clock cycles to be passed into simulation without multiple calls. This mechanism helps minimize the communication traffic of the events between the host (test bench) and the CHIPit system (prototyping system) resulting in an accelerated co-emulation and a dramatically shortened verification time," added Heiko Mauersberger, CTO of ProDesign.

Availability

The SCE-MI Transaction Based Verification tool set is immediately available with a starting price of 15,000 EUR in Europe and 18,000 US$ in North America.

More information at: http://www.uchipit.com.