Emulation

Users tend to do a lot of targeted functional verification as the RTL starts to come together. They need a platform that makes it easy and quick to port over their simulation environments and provide enough acceleration to cover the scenarios that are not ideal for simulation and formal environments. ZeBu’s simulation acceleration capabilities are utilized by industry’s major GPU, CPU, NPU, TPU providers along with other IP vendors in the networking, automotive sectors.

As RTL matures, users desire a platform that can provide orders of magnitude faster performance to cover long running suites. These regression suites serve the dual purpose of proving functional correctness, as well as getting closer to targets for coverage metrics. ZeBu’s transaction-based high-performance platform combines with its strong suite of industry’s latest Protocol Solutions (Transactor and Speed Adapters) to address these needs at some of the largest chip companies.

Starting from a reasonable level of RTL maturity, users start bringing up their software environments. There is a mix of bare-metal, low-level drivers and firmware, operating systems like Linux-Windows-Android, benchmark software application, general-purpose user applications that need to be brought up and proven functional. As the user persona evolves from being hardware-centric to a mix of hardware and software, ZeBu brings capabilities like Virtual Host Solutions to make the software developer feel at home. Combined with its superior performance, users can get very close to silicon like behavior.

As the designs near tape-out schedules, validation engineers get into a mode of mimicking their post-silicon lab environments. Their primary requirement is to enable hardware and software developers with a platform that could be used to serve as the highest-performance option in pre-silicon testing using real-world interfaces. They also want to build this platform as an option to reproduce and debug issues that they would encounter in the lab. Visibility into the design and being able to deterministically repeat those scenarios is key. ZeBu comes with a suite of strong debug technologies as well as a wide suite of speed adapters that have proven a capable partner for users to identify bugs and resolve them timely to not impact the customer’s time-to-market.

Users turn their attention to key design attributes of power and performance. They have long-running workloads that heavily exercise the DUT. By design, ZeBu can accurately model large number of clock domains prevalent in the modern SoC environments and yet provide the performance to execute these workloads. 

The ZeBu solution for Arm SBSA compliance enables running the Arm SBSA test suites and quickly identify non-compliant HW issues. SBSA compliance ensures that any software that has been compiled for the specific Arm architecture will run on the silicon being designed and verified with the SBSA compliance solution.

Synopsys Hardware-assisted Test Solutions are advanced stimulus generation and checking tools for the most difficult verification problems. HW-assisted Test Solutions maximize the ability to find critical bugs before a design reaches silicon, achieving compliance with the intended architecture.