Mentor adds verification intelligence to Questa platform
The increasing cost of designing embedded software is putting more pressure on SoC budgets and since there is no immediate answer to the software crisis, management is now focused on the high cost of verification -- but help is on the way, says EDA guru Gary Smith.
By Ann Steffora Mutschler, Senior Editor -- EDN, February 19, 2008
To speed up verification and improve verification coverage of today’s SoC designs, Wilsonville, Ore.-based semiconductor design software provider Mentor Graphics Corp launched Monday its Questa Multi-view Verification Components software and inFact intelligent testbench automation tool.
The company pointed out that the complexity of today’s SoC verification environments often require designers to spend time building and verifying multiple and usually incompatible verification models of a single block to support system-level, TLM-level and RTL-level verification, which prevents teams from easily moving up and down in abstraction and maximizing verification effectiveness.
Mentor said its Questa Multi-view Verification Components tool can connect to any level of abstraction from system to gates to help ensure consistent model behavior and give verification teams more options to improve performance and increase coverage.
Once verification components are available, designers need to create the stimulus to drive the models and doing this by hand is one of the most time-consuming steps in the verification flow, but by using advanced algorithms to synthesize non-repeating stimulus, Mentor said its intelligent testbench automation technology, inFact, simultaneously reduces test creation time, minimizes redundant testing, and stimulates more of the design – resulting in more bugs found and dramatically faster time to coverage.
Further, by combining these new tools with the Questa functional verification platform, the Open Verification Methodology (OVM), and standards like SystemVerilog, Mentor believes it is opening the doors to broader adoption of breakthrough verification flows.
Robert Hum, VP and general manager of Mentor’s design verification and test division explained in a statement, “The next major step in advanced functional verification happens when manual, time-consuming tasks are replaced with new levels of automation and tool intelligence. With the Questa functional verification platform, we believe we’re on the right track – not only from a technology point of view, but also in terms of providing a complete, comprehensive solution.”
Finally, Gary Smith, founder and chief analyst for market research company Gary Smith EDA reminded, “Throwing engineers at the problem is not an acceptable answer whether they be in the US, Europe or India. The target is to bring verification costs down to 35% of the total hardware design cost, and we can only do that through automation. The intelligent testbench is the missing ingredient in today’s verification flow. At DAC 2007 we saw three start-ups addressing the problem. Today Mentor announces their intelligent testbench tool. Help is on the way.”
inFact is available now and Questa MVCs will be available in Q2 with pricing starting at $25,000.
