fpga Synopsys, OR DINI, OR EVE - Google News
Monday, August 16, 2010
EVE duelling Mentor Patent Analysis
Thursday, May 6, 2010
PR: Mentor Veloce Emulator with TBX for Simulation Acceleration
Monday, May 3, 2010
Cadence Palladium XP Emulators Introduction
Features:
* Capacity – designs up to 2 Billion Gates
* Performance – upto 4 MHz
* Multi-domain/ users – Up to 512 users simultaneously
* Power Analysis –
* Metric Driven Verification -
* Embedded systems
* Highly Scalable
* Simulation Back Annotation – High fidelity representation of design so designers can quickly locate & fix bugs. Design teams can "hot-swap" simulation with acceleration & emulation.
* Configurations – XL for design teams, GXL for enterprise-class global teams
Sunday, April 25, 2010
FPGA challenges
FPGA prototyping has following limitations which make these time consuming. Validation teams working with complex designs or unstable designs have to plan several months & resources to make FPGA prototyping systems.
* Place & Routing - for designs spanning multiple FPGAs place & routing is hard
* Number of pins limitations on FPGAs, proprietary solutions offer work around but at expense of speed
* Design readiness - unstable and FPGA unfriendly code in RTL makes bring up extremely hard. Unready design blocks make it very difficult
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Synopsys HAPS
Here are some strengths offered by Synopsys HAPs, making it suitable for Product teams to deploy for projects.
* High Capacity - Synopsys HAPS technology offers somewhere in middle of Emulation & raw FPGA board solutions. Synopsys offers family of Xilinx FPGA (Virtex-6) boards that can be plugged and expanded for system needs.
* Tools for setup: Automated tools for System Setup, Synthesis, Partitioning, Initialization, Control, Debug
* Daughter cards for commons IO interfaces such as USB, DDR2, HDMI link etc
* Gate capacity ~5M gates/ board. Typical 25-75MHz system clocks (peak = 200MHz)
* Power/ Thermals/ Signal Integrity with 40 Layer board design & custom connectors
* Partitioning: With FPGAs there is inherent problem with design partitioning across multiple FPGAs due to pin limitations. Various techniques of pin multiplexing are used such as time multiplexing (penalty on speed). Pins are modeled as LVDS IOs running upto 1Gbit/s differential pairs instead of Virtex-6 fast serdes resources. This approach gives 128x1 signal per pair multiplexing giving overall 7X increase in # pins on FPGAs.
* Co-RTL simulation – implementation of event driven interfaces over UMRBus, co-simulate HAPs with VCS or other RTL simulators on the host. * UMRBus - HAPS boards are connected together over UMRBus – High speed link (Universal Multi-Resource Bus). UMRBus is used to connect to Host Platforms as well.
* Co-System Simulation -- SCE-MI 2.0 interface over UMRBus allowing testbenches & behavioral models in C/C++, SystemC, TLM2.0
* Synopsys DesignWare IP models are pre-tested on HAPS emulator, allowing architects to quickly put together models.
Overall I believe HAPS is great for SoC projects where each chip is ~5Million gates to fit on single board. I won't deploy HAPS for really large designs of such as 200Mgates. Synopsys tools for synthesis, partitioning, Designware ready IPs, Debug etc make the tool very cost effective as compared to Emulation.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
C to FPGA technology
C to FPGA is still in infancy & is used for custom applications. I haven't come across a known ASIC company deploying large scale ASIC design using C to FPGA as on going methodology. But technology is very promising and has found initial usage with big impact.
Applications where a system designer may need Hardware solution?
Here are some examples I pulled together to show where C to FPGA is deployed:
Financial Analytics:
* For a custom workload for example in Wall-street a company wants to quickly apply highly sophisticated algorithms to live stream data, algorithm developers often rely on CPU power to crunch the data quickly. Its possible to create FPGA based custom offload engines, where dedicated hardware engine can give edge to traders or trading companies.
There are several other dedicated custom hardware needs for following applications:
* Image and video processing; Video decoding; Fractal image generation; DSP filters
* Bioinformatics search algorithms
* Embedded processor acceleration
Todo: I'll add several use cases in future where C to FPGA technology can be deployed
Tools available to enable C to FPGA:
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Synopsys validation tools
Synopsys provides a comprehensive portfolio of system-level products that bridge the gap from system design to implementation.
VCS: A popular RTL simulator, allows designers to simulate block level, full-chip, system level simulation models & verify designs before sending designs to fabrication.
Some of random test vector generation tools such as Specman can be co-simulated with VCS to find corner case/ random bugs in the design.
VCS also allows co-simulation of SystemC/ C++/ TLM2.0 models
Innovator: Innovator platform came from Synopsys Virtio acquisition. Innovator allows system designers and software developers to quickly create fast Simulation models much before low level RTL designs are available or Si is available for SW developers to validate their SW with HW models called "virtual platforms". Innovator can help reduce overall development cycle as SW co-validation can start very early in development cycle.
CoMET/METoer -
Emulation: Synopsys offers HAPs platforms for FPGA based acceleration. Other commercial emulators from Mentor, Cadence, EVE can be used in validation environement.
Platform Architect: Platform architect provides rich set of SystemC/ TLM models useful for Co-simulation with Innovator or FPGA Emulation