GateRocket, a supplier of verification and debug solutions for advanced Field Programmable Gate Arrays or "FPGAs," announced that Empirix, which provides solutions for testing and monitoring voice communications systems, recently leveraged RocketVision and RocketDrive debug and verification solutions to reduce the development time for its latest complex FPGA-based design.
According to officials with Empirix (News - Alert), the company used the GateRocket tool suite to save weeks of development time delivering its 10Gb equipped HAMMER XMS solution to market, compared to previous projects.
For its latest generation of HAMMER XMS, Empirix chose a leading-edge FPGA device family in which the FPGA design consumes 74 percent of the chip's logic resources and 100 percent of the Block RAM (News - Alert), leaving no extra memory for on-chip logic analyzers.
The company selected the RocketDrive system because its Device Native approach to verification extends the existing simulation environment in a way that enables engineers to detect bugs in simulation that would otherwise slip through to system integration, the company said. RocketDrive, a hardware-based peripheral device, bridges the gap between the RTL and the FPGA, and enables silicon-accurate simulation because it actually contains the target FPGA device.
The GateRocket solution enabled Empirix engineers to quickly find and correct errors in their FPGA design, reduce time in the development lab, and cut down on the number of simulation-synthesis-place-and-route iterations previously required to successfully bring up their FPGA, they added.
The company faced a number of issues with its previous FPGA project, Empirix officials said. For example, they had to trade off valuable FPGA resources between product functionality and on-chip logic analyzer signal capture/storage. And because of the finite amount of on-chip Block RAM, the team had to sacrifice the breadth of observable signals in order to get adequate depth for capture memories to store the results of long runs.
The process led to time-consuming iterations due to missed critical signals, FPGA re-compile and re-map cycles taking 12-15 hours. The engineers at Empirix also struggled to find the root-cause of bugs since logic errors, timing issues and tool-flow related bugs were mixed together at the system-level.
"A next-generation FPGA was critical to the continued success of Hammer XMS, but the complexity and size of the new device, plus integrating additional complex IP, introduced a new level of debug and verification challenges," Mike Garofalo, engineering manager at Empirix, added. "We had a very tough time debugging our previous FPGA design, which was much less complex, so we knew we needed a more efficient approach this time."
GateRocket's RocketVision debugging software, an option for the RocketDrive, allowed the team to access the internal signals of the native FPGA hardware directly from the simulation debug environment and automatically detect any mismatches between the simulation model and the actual silicon, the company said.
The new 'soft-patch' feature of RocketVision enabled Empirix engineers to instantly swap blocks between hardware and RTL representations, enabling them to get critical visibility on certain modules and test 'what if' scenarios without having to rebuild the FPGA.
"By using the GateRocket solution to streamline our overall verification process, we saved at least two man-months on the very first project, and we expect that it will have even more value in the future as we exploit more of its capabilities at both block and chip-level verification," Garofalo added.
Back in April, GateRocket announced that Qualcomm (News - Alert) has adopted its RocketDrive and RocketVision products to address the increasing complexity of the FPGAs and ASICs its engineering teams are developing. Qualcomm adopted GateRocket after a comprehensive internal evaluation of the product's capabilities, particularly in the area of simulation acceleration, company officials said.
Rajani Baburajan is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Rajani's articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by Stefania Viscusi