SAN FRANCISCO -- EDA vendor Mentor Graphics Corp Wednesday(April 25) announced the availability of its next-generation hardware emulationsystem, Veloce2, promising twice the performance, twice the capacity, and fourtimes productivity gain in the same footprint and power consumption as itspredecessor.
Mentor (Wilsonville, Ore) also tipped a related new concept,Veloce VirtuaLAB, said to provide verification engineers access to easy-to-use,software-based peripherals connected to the Veloce platform. Thesesoftware-based peripherals provide a "virtual lab" environment toverify complex electronics systems, including the embedded software and theSoCs that make up the system prior to first silicon availability, according toJim Kenney, director of marketing for Mentor's emulation division.
According to Kenney, more customers continue to adoptemulation as designs get larger and the gap between emulation performance andsimulation tools grows wider. Kenney said Mentor sees growth of emulationdriven by three factors: larger designs, the need among existing emulationusers for more capacity and customers' desire to execute debug software soonerthan they can with a simulator or FPGA prototype.
According to Gary Smith EDA, the emulation market isexpected to be worth about $211 million in 2012, up from about $118 million in2008. Kenney, who believes those numbers may be conservative, used additionaldata supplied by the EDA Consortium to estimate that the emulation market wasworth about $225 million in 2011 and expected to be worth more this year.
Gary Smith EDA estimates that the market share of Veloce,the predecessor to the system introduced Wednesday, grew from about 9% in 2008to about 36% in 2010.
"We've done quite well and, now that we are introducinga new product, we expect to keep capturing more market share with Veloce,"Kenney said.
Veloce2 is built upon a full custom emulation IC, Crystal2,developed from the ground up by Mentor, according to the company. The 65-nmchip's fast compile, full debug visibility and advanced memory modeling are atthe heart of the Veloce2 platform's performance and capacity gains, Mentorsaid.
Veloce2's software suite is backward compatible withfirst-generation Veloce emulators, boosting the productivity of current Velocecustomers and preserving their investment while extending the useful life oftheir Veloce hardware, Mentor said. Future generations of Veloce will adhere tothis common software philosophy, making Veloce emulators an excellent long-terminvestment, according to the company.
Kenney said the Veloce VirtuaLAB is a new concept pioneeredby Mentor, which offers a number of advantages over in-circuit emulation. Byintegrating RTL models of key peripherals like USB, Ethernet, and PCIe, theVirtuaLAB is able to create a full target environment that allows developers tovalidate both the hardware and embedded software, before any hardware ismanufactured, accelerating product design cycles, he said.
Veloce VirtuaLAB is entirely software-based, making it easyto replicate to support multiple software and hardware developerssimultaneously, according to Mentor. Previously, system developers had toconnect physical peripherals to the emulator via hardware speed adaptors,making the process cumbersome and expensive to support multiple userssimultaneously.
According to Kenney, Veloce VirtuaLAB effectively takes theemulator out of the lab environment and moves it into a data centerenvironment, where the resource can be shared across multiple projects andgeographies. Kenney noted that VirtualLAB can be reconfigured without physicalaccess, a key requirement to it being hosted in a datacenter.
Veloce VirtuaLAB peripherals are available for most popularprotocols, such as multimedia video/audio standards, Gigabit Ethernet, USB, PCIExpress, SATA, and SAS. Mentor said more will follow.
The Veloce2 platform and Veloce VirtuaLAB are availableimmediately, Mentor said. According to Kenney, Mentor has already delivered sixVeloce2 systems to customers, with most of them now being used in production.
This story was originally posted by EETimes.
