News and New Products

ESL market adds an enterprise player

By Michael Santarini, Senior Editor -- EDN, 12/5/2006

Cadence Design Systems Inc is making an enterprise-level play in the ESL (electronic-system-level)-software market by adding features to its Enterprise Manager environment, its Incisive Enterprise Simulator, and its new Palladium III emulator. Steve Glaser, corporate vice president of marketing in Cadence's verification division, says that most ESL-verification tool flows now focus on the handoff between systems engineers (chip architects) and embedded-software developers. Glaser says, however, that ESL impacts several other disciplines in the flow and vice versa. These disciplines include hardware-design engineers, verification engineers, system-validation engineers and project managers. Each of these disciplines interacts at some level, and the amount of interaction varies, depending on the nature of the design.

Glaser notes that the EDA industry hasn't yet produced a viable ESL-verification flow or even a tool to manage the scope of ESL within an enterprise. "The end goal of the customer is to get a predictable path to system quality and avoid re-spins. Even more important, errors at the system level can escape all the way to the end customer, … and product recalls can be enormously expensive," he says. "We're helping groups take a closer look at the complexities of their designs and giving them a way to manage the risks of those complexities—from spec and planning all the way to closure."

To accomplish this task, Cadence has extended its Incisive Enterprise Manager environment to form an ESL-flow-management system. Cadence released the Incisive Enterprise Manager last year. That product was a derivative of the vPlan and vManager products, which Verisity developed, and which Cadence acquired when it acquired Verisity in 2003. That version of Incisive Enterprise Manager allowed users to create an RTL (register-transfer level)-to-gate-level verification plan to help design teams track verification progress and give them a better idea of whether they had done enough verification on a design. That version introduced management of assertion-based acceleration in PSL (Process Specification Language) and SVA (System Verilog Assertion) and transaction-based acceleration in SystemC and the e Testbench language. The version ran on the Incisive Enterprise Simulator and the Palladium II emulation system.

With this release, Cadence has extended the hardware-verification-plan and coverage-metric features of Incisive Enterprise Manager to embedded systems and software tools. Doing so allows enterprises to create ESL flows and track and analyze systemwide-verification activities, with the goal of refining the flow so that users can reduce time to market.

With this release, the company has also created an ESL option for its Incisive Enterprise Simulator. With the option, the simulator can now perform constrained random-scenario generation, and it includes a generic-software adapter that allows users to integrate embedded tools of their choice into the Cadence flow. The tool also supports the use of UVCs (Universal Verification Components) verification IP (intellectual property). The UVCs send Incisive Enterprise Manager software subroutines in various sequences and measure coverage of those function calls. With the new ESL functions, users can also perform hardware-to-software debugging and failure analysis to test failures across the hardware-to-software boundary.

The company has also added algorithms to Incisive Enterprise Manager and the ESL option to the Incisive Enterprise Simulator to allow the new Palladium III emulator to run in the ESL environment. Ran Avinun, product-marketing group director in the system-level-verification group, says the new Palladium III includes a 256 million-gate top capacity and double the runtime and debugging performance of the Palladium II system. Emulation systems give users 100% visibility into the functions of their chip but typically run at speeds of only approximately 1 MHz. Furthermore, emulators are expensive. Avinun says that Palladium III will be attractive to traditional emulation users but that the new ties to ESL will potentially expand the usefulness of the emulation system to a broader number of users within an enterprise—groups looking at both hardware and software debugging.

Palladium III supports constrained random verification, as well as assertion-based acceleration in PSL and SVA and transaction-based acceleration in SystemC and the e Testbench language. Glaser claims that using Cadence's Enterprise ESL system will allow enterprises to cut time to market of IC projects by 50%. Prices for Enterprise Manager start at $70,000 for subscription licenses, and prices for the Enterprise Simulator start at $38,000. The ESL option costs $11,000 for users who own the simulator. Cadence sells Palladium III systems, but for users lacking million-dollar budgets, the company offers leasing and remote access to the system for prices starting at $150,000.