Device vendors providing library support to Mentor

Electronic News, April 3, 1995

WILSONVILLE, ORE. - Mentor Graphics has lined up Vital-compliant library support for its QuickVHDL simulator from 12 vendors of ASICs and programmable logic devices.

Vital libraries are available now or within the next 90 days from Altera, American Microsystems Inc. (AMI), AT&T Microelectronics, Fujitsu, IBM, OKI Semiconductor North America, United Technologies Microelectronics Center (UTMC), VLSI Technology and Xilinx. Libraries will be available in Q3 from Actel and Honeywell, and from LSI Logic by the end of 1995.

QuickVHDL, is fully compliant with version 2.2b of the proposed VHDL Initiative Toward ASIC Libraries (Vital) standard, which is being submitted to the IEEE for balloting. QuickVHDL has at its core the V-System VHDL simulator from Model Technology, which Mentor acquired late last year (EN, Dec. 12, 1994), and Mentor has added considerable library support and other features to that simulation engine. The simulator is priced at $14,950 per floating license, and is available on Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun Microsystems workstations.

Mentor's four ASIC Vendor Operation Centers around the world are working with the ASIC and programmable logic vendors to deliver libraries on time. The company has scheduled eight free seminars on "Top-Down VHDL Simulation with Vital" for cities across the U.S. and Canada during April and May.

"Today, Vital offers end-users higher simulation performance in a VHDL environment, mixed-level design verification capabilities and improved portability of libraries and design data across EDA tools," said Steve Schulz, technical staff member at the Defense Systems & Electronics Group of Texas Instruments. "In addition, Vital offers a great base from which to explore extensions and enhancements to handle other design requirements, such as timing and fault analysis, test and testability analysis, power analysis and synthesis. It is clear that Vital is an important and growing standard."

Peter Hwang, EDA relations manager for Altera, said: "As Altera pushes programmable logic gate capacity to 100,000, we require high simulation capacity and speed for top-down design. This has caused Altera to embrace QuickVHDL through Vital as a key enabling technology for high-density programmable logic design. Altera is pleased to announce that its Vital libraries are under test with QuickVHDL, with scheduled release in Q2."

Michael Kohl, director of design automation at VLSI Technology, said: "We've examined the Vital specifications in detail and believe it contains everything necessary for sign-off simulation. This enables us to implement one library standard to satisfy the potential needs of many simulation vendors. We also believe Vital-compliant simulators, such as QuickVHDL, provide one of many viable VHDL design options for our customers."

Tom Chao, director of engineering at OKI Semiconductor, said: "We view high-level design automation (HLDA) as an important design methodology for our deep-submicron technology. That's why we were very gratified to see Mentor Graphics' QuickVHDL/AutoLogic II HLDA solution. When we tested Mentor Graphics' QuickVHDL, we found that it helped speed up our simulations. Last year, we developed Vital-compliant libraries at OKI, and wondered if and how they would work. We were able to verify our Vital libraries using QuickVHDL, and were very satisfied with its performance."

Jim Pena, director of ASIC methodology marketing at LSI Logic, said: "LSI is a strong supporter of standards and was one of the first suppliers of VHDL libraries. Vital provides a superior was to ship a single, platform-independent VHDL library and allows us a more cost-efficient way to deliver our system-on-a-chip capabilities."

Russell Ray, EDA tools facilitator at AMI, said: "AMI is committed to supporting customers using a VHDL-based design methodology. Mentor Graphics' leading QuickVHDL simulation product fits in with that goal. Our development of Vital libraries for QuickVHDL is the first step toward AMI's plan to provide sign-off capability to our customers using QuickVHDL and Vital."

Peggy Kvam, design automation manager at Honeywell, said: "With the acceptance of Vital, the VHDL language gains a quantum leap in terms of usefulness for designers. We see QuickVHDL is one of our flagship simulation environments for the design of military applications."