( DAC 01 Item 22 ) --------------------------------------------- [ 7/31/01 ]
Subject: Quickturn, IKOS, Aptix, Axis, Simpod, Tharas, Simutech, Gidel
WHEN SW FAILS YOU: Sometimes all the compiled Verilog CPU cycles in the
world aren't enough to really wring out the nasty bugs in your design.
That's when you need to plunk down some serious cash and buy yourself a HW
accelerator/emulator. Or, if you're on the cheap, you try to do it with
quasi home grown FPGA boards. Or sometimes you want your design (that's
still only a couple hundred thousand lines of Verilog RTL) to interact with
real world chips. Either way, you're talking about using EDA hardware in
lieu of traditional EDA software.
"We don't accelerate, we emulate with our own FPGA boards. It's a pain
to partition, and layout, but we do it because of all our big memories
around our parts."
- Paul Schnizlein, Agere Systems
"We just bought a Quickturn Mercury Plus. We plan to use it for driver
development as well as design verification. We used System Realizer
before and although there were a number of thorny issues, especially
with respect to RAMs, the Quickturn support was generally excellent so
that we were able to be successful with it. The Mercury Plus is
supposed to solve the RAM write problems we had before, and has full
internal visibility, which is a very valuable feature."
- Carl Wakeland, Creative Advanced Technology Center
"We use IKOS heavily. We have reviewed Aptix and see it as a big
investment for us to use and haven't pursued it further. We pretty
routinely crank out FPGA prototypes for our ASICs. FPGAs themselves
have gotten bigger and more flexible which keeps them in the running
for doing straight, custom prototypes."
- Tom Coonan, Scientific Atlanta
"I've used the IKOS accelerators for large scale image and graphics
processor simulation, with excellant results. When you're simulating
a few seconds of of video at 1280 x 1024 resolution, you'd better have
an accelerator (or several). Although I'd be interested to see how
some of the parallel VCS products running on several hunderd servers
would compare in performance.
I did get an Axis accelerator demo as well, and what little I saw of it
looked good, a reasonable UI and interface."
- Tom Moxon of Moxon Design
"Historically IKOS (becoming part of Synopsys?) has made hardware
accelerators and Quickturn (now part of Cadence) has made emulators.
Quickturn was always known for their great DAC parties - oh well. IKOS
has gotten into the emulator business and it now accounts for 70% of
their business. Quickturn was selling small accelerators built by
Tharas Systems but they've stopped that, although you can still buy
them directly from Tharas. Tharas emphasized that they can accelerate
some types of testbenches, too, which prevents the accelerator from
twiddling its thumbs waiting for the workstation to send it the next
vector. Axis sells a box that sounds like a cross between an
accelerator and an emulator. It maps your design to processor elements
on FPGAs. They say you need no methodology changes. It is Verilog only
but can use VHDL testbenches. It is event driven but zero delay, so it
allows for non-cycle-friendly test benches. Logic Express sells
emulators that they say are higher speed and lower cost than their
competitors.
Aptix, Gidel and Nallatech sell FPGA based prototype boards. In
addition to mapping your design onto the FPGAs, you can use other
physical components. For example, if your design uses a DSP core, you
can put a DSP on the board. The Gidel board has 7.5 million gates
total plus 126 Meg of SDRAM. Software is $10K, boards are $2500 to
$40K, which is a hell of a lot cheaper than an emulator. The biggest
Aptix board holds 6.4 million gates and gobs of RAM. You can start with
VHDL, Verilog or System C, and it will partition your design
automatically into the FPGAs. You can also mix the board and software
simulation. Nallatech sells boards that are smaller and cheaper than
Aptix or Gidel."
- John Weiland, Intrinsix
"IKOS is still the company to beat in hardware emulation, but Axis is
also doing some interesting things. Verplex Tuxedo-LEC is still the
clear winner in logic equivalence checking."
- Mike Carter of Mosaid Technologies
"IKOS is the mainstay - a lot of our customers like using it, although
it's env is quirky (ie. PIN for netlist, esoteric modeling language)."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Competition is becoming harder due to new vendors/tools emerging
Quickturn : launched a new product Palladium
- capacity : up to 16MG logic with 8GB memory
- short compilation time 10x shorter than the existing product
Axis : XCITE
- RTL directly compiled onto computing elements (no synthesis!)
- capacity : 20MG
Tharas : simulation accelerator Hammer
- HDL compiled to VLWI running on 128 processors
- 2 minutes for 300KG design, 1hr for 8MG design
- product line (2MG/4MG/8MG), $115K for 2MG capacity
Simutech : RAVE
- IP Centric : up to 31 CoreBoard (consisting of FPGA for IP
and another FPGA used as traffic cop for back plane I/f) can
be plugged in
Many of them demonstrated integration with ARM debugger
- ARM debugger used as GUI to setup break points
- HW emulator running behind"
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"We have Eageli licenses be very low usage with it. I spoke to our s/w
developers about dropping the product, but they said "No!". They want
it as a back up and they have used it some. However, HW/SW co-sim is
very slow and we have found that rolling our own emulation boards has
proven much more effective because of the speed advantage. We are
seriously evaluating the use of an Aptix box vs rolling our own boards
and it is not clear yet which methodology will win out. It still make
sense for us to do both. We have been doing this evaluation for over a
year so far. We have been successful rolling our own boards, but have
not been successful with Aptix yet. However, we have improved
significantly with Aptix and we feel we have gone through the learning
curve. The major lessons learned on Aptix:
- most of the Aptix success stories are products developed on
FPGA's first and then became ASIC's. Our approach of developing
an ASIC and then moving the design to an FPGA is a less travelled
route.
- Aptix handles Verilog much better that VHDL. (What U.S.
EDA vendor doesn't?)
- Aptix hardware is very good, but their software is still raw and we
are on the biting, bleeding edge.
We should be charging them for improving their product."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Aptix markets an emulation system somewhere between raw FPGAs and a
Quickturn box. I spoke to their Austin-based AE, who previously had
been AE for IKOS. He said Aptix solves a number of IKOS' challenges
system looked very similar to the one I saw at Simutech base system
is around $300K, pruned-down "replicants" for SW groups cost around
$100K apiece."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Simutech
New company, market an emulation system somewhere between raw FPGAs and
a Quickturn box able to combine "coreboard" designs (utilizing
bonded-out ICs for things like ARM/MIPs) with FPGAs for logic. It's
able to run in HW/debug environment (concurrent with ModelSim, for
example) or SW/debug environment. Once HW designers have stable
system, and replicate it in cheaper emulators for use by SW engineers
System can run 10-100kHz with co-sim, 1-6MHz in standalone mode, and up
to 100MHz if coreboard cards are used. Aptix is main competitor."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Tharas Systems Hardware Accelerator
-----------------------------------
I attended a Tharas Systems demo of their hardware accelerator. It is
not an FPGA-based system, so the compile times are very fast -- on the
order of minutes instead of the hours required by FPGA-based systems.
A few highlights:
* provides 10x to 50x acceleration over Verilog simulators,
* boxes for 2, 4, & 8 M gates,
* cost $100k-$300 range instead of the $1M range of other systems.
I did not get a chance to visit any other vendors, so I don't really
know the whole space, but based on the demo and the cost points, it's
starting to look feasible. It seemed very easy to use, and it provided
interactive debugging. They are also working with Verisity to provide
improved compatibility with Specman Elite testbenches."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Tharas
Tharas is a simulation accelerator and IKOS competitor. The tool is
not based on FPGAs, and the demo-guy mentioned "picojava" once very
quickly. The code that they accelerate does not need to be
synthesizable - it can have gated clocks, intial blocks, system
tasks, user tasks, UPD, etc. They said something about
non-synthesizable code being passed to VCS, but I'm not sure I
heard that right.
They support incremental compiles, which is a huge thing, but we don't
know if IKOS supports that or not.
The Tharas accelerator provides up to 1GB of dedicated memory for
modeling RAMs. Your 2D structures will be modeled in this special
area of memory as well. They have seen the following compile times:
2 minutes : 200K Gates
8 minutes : 1M Gates
40 minutes : 8M Gates
The product is scalable, depending on the size of your problem. It
does cosim using your existing simulator. It has an interface to
DeBussy. It ships on Solaris and they have Linux running internally.
The pricing is $.035-$.055 per gate plus maintenance.
We liked Tharas because they gave away really cute stuffed cheetahs."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Aldec's Riviera IPT could break in to the low-end of this market. The
less effort and expense involved in emulation/prototyping the better."
- Andrew MacCormack, Tality/Cadence
"Although they are always working on it, I think the Aptix and Quickturn
type emulators are too hard to use without a big commitment of
resources. If you need them, then you have no choice, but despite what
the sales people say, they aren't pushbutton by any means and
performance is very hard to predict until you actually put your design
on it. I don't like having to modify my design for the emulator but
many times you have to design with the emulator architecture in mind
which can impact design performance.
I am really interested in the Axis Xcite accelerators and the Simpod
Deskpod but haven't actually used them myself."
- Tom Loftus, Intrinsix
"Strange that you didn't mention Axis in your survey, John. In my
previous company (a startup) we used Axis during its beta/beta2
releases and found it GREAT!"
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Simutech and Simpod sell boxes that allows you to hook real parts into
your simulator.
Aldec sells a cheap NT-based simulator and design entry tool that takes
VHDL, Verilog or EDIF. They also sell a board where you can hook real
parts into your simulation.
Dynalith sells a small box with an FPGA and a processor. You hook this
into your system for in-system verification of your design before you
have a real part. The FPGA does the interface to the system, and the
processor runs a C language model of your design.
Arexsys is now part of Valiosys. They sell a backplane for mixed
language simulation. For VHDL, they can use MTI or VSS. For Verilog,
any simulator that takes PLI is usable. It also hooks into Matlab,
Saber (Avanti's analog simulator) and Cosapp."
- John Weiland, Intrinsix
"The Dynalith's iSAVE "C" verification system looked interesting, an
offshoot of a KAIST (Korean Advanced Institute for Science and
Technology) project for microprocessor development. Again the theme
of moving verifcation earlier in the process, executing in "C" on a
target verifcatin system."
- Tom Moxon of Moxon Design
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