Quickturn establishes new engineering services group

Electronic News, June 12, 1995

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF.--Quickturn Design Systems is establishing a Time-to-Market Engineering Services group to help customers employ logic emulation in their design projects, especially those involving single- or multiple-chip designs with more than 1 million gates.

Services to be provided by the new group include project management, application-specific consulting, custom design modeling, methodology and tool integration, system integration and on-site support and training.

Christopher J. Tice, Quickturn's VP of worldwide support services, said the successful experiences of such Quickturn customers as Advanced Micro Devices, Philips Semiconductor, Sun Microsystems, Data General, SGS-Thomson, Tandem Computers, 3Com and Siemens Nixdorf have proven that emulation is "a very necessary service and a very necessary verification strategy."

With more than 500 systems installed over the past seven years, Quickturn has a wealth of experience in utilizing emulation to shorten design cycles and cut costs by reducing the need to fabricate prototype devices, according to Mr. Tice. The company is also hiring people experienced in product design as part of the application-specific focus of the engineering services group. "We're hiring people with design experience, not just CAD experience," he said.

Quickturn's establishing this group is making formal the type of custom services it has extended to customers for several years. "We're recognizing there's always been a latent demand by customers for application-specific knowledge," Mr. Tice said. "It's a growing part of our business." The new group already has several contracts; Mr. Tic declined to identify customers.

While providing customers with a reassuring and useful level of services on top of standard applications support with the new group, "our model is not to create dependency, but to make customers self-sufficient in emulation," Mr. Tice added. Quickturn is targeting the areas of computing, communications and interactive media for logic emulation services.

Metaflow Technologies of La Jolla, Calif., is developing a SuperSparc-compatible microprocessor, and served as a pilot site for Quickturn's Time-to-Market Engineering Services group. "Only 10 weeks after the pilot program began, Metaflow and Quickturn engineers successfully went in-circuit and immediately ran 'open boot' on an emulation of its Sparc microprocessor," said Val Popescu, president of Metaflow. "As we are now working in-circuit, we look forward to building a complete bug list that will enable us to eliminate several silicon spins and ensure a production-ready design this year."

Working with Siemens Nixdorf on a new I/O control chip, Quickturn provided compile, functional test, on-site training and support and target interface and system slowdown consulting services. Quickturn said it was able to help the German company reduce its design schedule by three months, while finding and fixing two bugs prior to silicon.

Typical engineering services provided by Quickturn, as part of an application-specific package, include planning emulation project schedules, implementing test strategies and specific test benches, developing custom target system interfaces and buffering devices and consulting for target system design.