Hardware verification platform handles 12M gates

Hardware verification platform handles 12M gates

San Jose, Calif. - French startup Emulation and Verification Engineering SA has upped the capacity of its Zebu hardware verification platform to 12 million ASIC gates by introducing a daisy-chain configuration that allows users to connect several Zebu verification cards.

At the Design Automation & Test in Europe conference in March, the company released its Zebu (zero bugs) ZV-8000 verification boards, each utilizing two Xilinx Inc. XC2V8000 FPGAs-the largest-capacity Virtex-II chips. The ASIC-gate capacity of a Zebu card is 1.5 million gates, the company said. Up to eight of the cards can be connected with the Z-EmuNet system, for a maximum verification capacity of 12 million ASIC gates, Emulation and Verification Engineering (EVE) said.

Lauro Rizzatti, vice president of marketing, said Z-EmuNet is EVE's latest way of bringing high-capacity, relatively low-cost hardware verification to the masses. "The market for million-dollar emulation systems is dead; there is no future for it," he said. "Even when the economy bounces back there will be a sale here or there, but not too many people can afford the price points the larger vendors charge for emulation."

'Software price points'

The need for hardware verification has never been higher, Rizzatti said, as designs approach 100 million gates. "It's our company's mission to offer hardware verification at software price points," he said. EVE, based in Palaiseau, France, with a U.S. office here, hasn't yet launched a product that can accommodate a 100 million-gate design but plans to do so next year, he said.

In the meantime, the company's new configuration should be attractive to mainstream groups that need a way to speed the verification of designs with about 12 million gates but that are unable to afford large emulation systems, Rizzatti said.

Each Zebu 8000 is priced at $75,000, but EVE will sell an eight-board configuration for less than $600,000, Rizzatti said. The linking system can also be used to connect Zebu 6000-series boards, which sell for $49,000 apiece. An eight-board system of Zebu 6000 boards is priced at less than $392,000, or about the same as one place and route seat. Users can also use Z-EmuNet to mix and match Zebu 6000 and 8000 boards.

Z-EmuNet includes a connecting cable plus software that facilitates the partitioning of an ASIC design onto eight Zebu boards. Designers can also use Certify, the ASIC-to-FPGA partitioner software from Synplicity Inc., for the job. The Zebu cards can run together on one workstation with eight PCI slots or on eight workstations with one card each.

Faster than standalone

Luc Burgun, co-founder, president and chief executive officer of EVE, said each additional board increases the performance of the verification run but slows the overall process. Where a single-board configuration runs verification at 10 MHz, an eight-board configuration will run at 100 kHz. Rizzatti said this would still be several orders of magnitude faster than standalone simulation.

EVE's emulation platform can also be connected to standard HDL and system-level simulation environments for mixed verification. Again, this would slow overall verification but would still be much faster than standalone simulation, Rizzatti said.

Engineers tend to shy away from hardware verification platforms because of the partitioning chore involved, Rizzatti said. The systems had tens or hundreds of programmable devices that required a design be chopped into tens or hundreds of pieces to program the hardware verification system. The partitioning software in Z-EmuNet simplifies that process, he said.

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