News and New Products

High-speed interfaces get PHY verification

By Michael Santarini -- EDN, 4/14/2005

EDA start-up Knowlent Corp is offering a product to speed verification of the PHY (physical layer) of high-speed interfaces implemented in IC designs. The Opal simulation and debugging environment checks a design's PHY compliance with high-speed interface standards, such as PCI Express, ATI, and DDR. Knowlent President and Chief Executive Officer Sandipan Bhanot says that, although numerous companies offer cores and verification suites for the functional layer of high-speed-communication standards and a handful of players offer analog PHY cores for those standards, verification suites checking PHY-layer compliance with communications standards has been scarce.

Knowlent, which ex-Cadence (www.cadence.com) executives founded in 2001, has done most of the grunt work to create EVPs (electrical verification platforms), essentially testbenches for third-party Spice simulators that ensure that designs comply with PHY-level high-speed interface specifications. “It is very different to run electrical tests as opposed to digital because the IP [intellectual property] has to be changed for every type of test,” says Bhanot. “For example, if you are running a transient simulation, you just attach a simple load model at the end. On the other hand, if you are running return-loss measurement, you need several different types of models. We take all these variations and run them through Spice.” Using Opal also means that users need not manually set up files for different types of tests (Picture).

Bhanot says that the EVPs will help with return-loss measurement and test for jitter, with one adapter testing for random jitter and another testing for deterministic jitter. The adapters also test whether a PHY conforms to eye-diagram specifications for a given standard. Initial EVP releases will target PCI-Express and Serial ATA, with other high-speed-interface EVPs to follow in the coming months. The starting price is $65,000 for an annual subscription.

The first customer for Opal is the PHY group of Artisan Components (www.artisan.com), which ARM Ltd (www.arm.com) now own. IP vendor and memory-modeling company Denali Software (www.denali.com) is an investor, and its chief executive officer, Sanjay Srivastava, serves as a director on Knowlent's board of directors.

Knowlent, 1-408-748-0600, www.knowlent.com.