New products include Veloce HYCON, Strato+, Primo, and proFPGA.
Siemens Digital Industries Software has launched its next generation Veloce hardware-assisted verification system. Veloce combines virtual verification, hardware emulation and FPGA (field-programmable gate array) prototyping technologies. According to Siemens, this enables the rapid verification of sophisticated integrated circuit (IC) designs, optimizing verification cycles and reducing verification costs. Veloce is currently available, according to Siemens, and is being used in production by many customers worldwide.
System-on-Chip (SoC) designers must complete full system-level verification pertaining to all hardware blocks, all interactions occurring between them, and all application software before the chip can be built. Emulators, desktop prototype boards, and enterprise prototypes can be used as verification tools. Emulation is generally used to verify circuit blocks in the early design stages, while desktop prototype units help software developers verify their application code. Enterprise prototyping serves as a bridge between the power of an emulator and the performance of a prototyping system. This increases the speed of hardware-based verification and optimizes the total cost of ownership.
Siemens has improved the Veloce hardware-assisted verification system by upgrading it with four new products, which provide a full SoC verification landscape:
- Veloce HYCON (HYbrid CONfigurable) is a virtual platform for software-enabled verification.
- Veloce Strato+ is a capacity upgraded hardware emulator that combines high total throughput with fast co-model bandwidth and time to visibility.
- Veloce Primo is for enterprise-level FPGA prototyping, and, according to Siemens, combines industry-leading runtime performance with exceptionally fast prototype bring-up.
- Veloce proFPGA is used for desktop FPGA prototyping based on a modular architecture that provides scalability across a range of capacity requirements.
During the verification process, users can design and test virtual SoC models. This intelligent verification approach allows market-specific, real-world workloads, frameworks, and benchmarks to be run early in the verification stage, providing power and performance analysis of the future product.
“The Veloce Primo enterprise prototype system from Siemens EDA provides SoC verification teams higher capacity than the desktop prototype and a lower cost-per-gate and cost-per-MHz than an emulator. That helps verification teams reduce the overall cost of ownership of their hardware verification resources even as it helps to accelerate the verification cycle,” said Steve Bailey, director of Product Management at Siemens EDA.
Veloce HYCON software-enabled verification and validation enables earlier hardware verification through early workload analysis. This approach breaks the hardware dependency on system software. This is important because a product’s hardware is often designed earlier than its software, yet it is essential to ensure that the hardware will operate correctly with the intended software.
Users can run real-world firmware and software on Veloce Strato+ during IP integration. This enables future hardware to be diagnosed and debugged.
The verification continues with Veloce Primo, which validates the software-hardware interfaces. The application-level software is also checked while running at near to actual system speeds. Veloce Primo prototypes include higher-performance hardware that can run emulation regression suites, execute in-circuit emulation (ICE) tests, and verify application software. The full-chip verification requires high speed to handle the huge number of tests that will provide full coverage.
Veloce Strato+ and Veloce Primo use the same Register Transfer Level (RTL) simulation, the same virtual verification environment, and the same models for reusability of verification collateral, environment and test content.
“We are establishing a new standard for a system that is capable of supporting the new verification requirements across a diverse set of industries-spanning computing and storage, AI/ML, 5G, networking, and automotive,” said Ravi Subramanian, senior VP and GM of Siemens EDA.
