Hardware-Assisted Simulation Acceleration
Functional verification is a daunting task. As chip densities grow, so does the complexity of verifying the functional behavior of the design. To compound the problem, the complexity of functional verification grows faster than design density because of the interaction between a growing combination of functional units and 3rd Party IP blocks within a design. To get products to market in a timely fashion, teams either have to take the risk to tape-out early with less confidence that verification is complete or find more effective ways to test more.
Eve's Simulation Acceleration Model
Traditional software simulators offer very convenient use models, relatively low cost, and sophisticated debugging capabilities. Unfortunately, they suffer dramatic throughput deterioration as the design size increases. The bottom line is that software simulators are running out of steam for the current and future generations of chip designs. As the clock frequencies of CPUs is reaching a limit and processor vendors move to multi-core products instead, the performance gap is only guaranteed to get wider.
ZeBu-AX, our hardware-assisted simulation accelerator is the solution to more simulation throughput. Requiring no changes to your existing verification environment, it provides immediate RTL acceleration even for testbenches that rely on the most advanced verification methodologies available today. It works equally well for gate-level acceleration and is especially suitable for ATPG and other long testpatterns.
Predicting RTL Acceleration Speed-up
You can predict the acceleration factor offered by simulation acceleration very simply, before using ZeBu, by simply profiling your existing RTL simulation using your HDL simulator.The profiling information will report the time spent by the HDL simulator in various modules of the design and testbench. Adding all the time spent in the testbench and ignoring the time spent in the design itself will give the approximate accelerated simulation time. For instance, as the figure shows, if 90% of the simulation time is spent in the design and 10% in the testbench, then the likely acceleration factor will be ten times (from 100% to 10%).
To simulate even faster, ZeBu-AX can also accelerate in hardware most testbench and behavioral constructs.
