Mentor delivers hardware-assisted solution for accelerated verification of serial-ATA II products

WILSONVILLE, USA: Mentor Graphics Corp. has announced its hardware-assisted solution to accelerate the verification of Serial-ATA (SATA) II products, including hard disk drives (HDD) and optical CD/DVD drives.

This new solution enables designers to test their system-on-chips (SoCs) that control a HDD or optical drive by providing an accurate, hardware-based model of the real disk drive connected to their SoC.

This iSolve SATA product has a “plug-and-play” interface to the Veloce® family of hardware-assisted emulators, providing a cost-effective and efficient solution to verify SATA designs. The new product adds to the existing iSolve family of solutions for the accelerated verification of applications such as multimedia, networking, embedded systems, wireless, and storage devices.

The foundation stone of the consumer storage industry is based on the ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) protocol, which has evolved into today’s widely used serial—ATA standard. With the ever-increasing demands from higher data transfer technologies, SATA has allowed manufacturers to push forward the operating speeds of storage devices to 3Gb/s with the application of the SATA II standard.

These devices play a major role in many of today’s products, from consumer to network storage devices, and place a heavy burden on SoC designers who need to verify how their designs interact with the SATA devices connected to them.

“New consumer and network storage products increasingly depend upon the use of the latest-generation SATA devices, and design engineers are concerned over how they can quickly and efficiently verify their SoC designs that connect to these devices,” said Jim Kenney, Mentor Emulation Division (MED) director of marketing.

“We took a new approach to solve these challenges with our iSolve SATA product by providing a flexible, easy-to-use, and highly configurable SATA device model. This gives our customers the ability to verify multiple configurations and descriptions of SATA devices, all with the same emulator solution rather than needing many specific devices.”

Combined with the Veloce emulation family, the iSolve SATA product delivers a high-performance and easy-to-use system verification environment to develop new SoCs containing a SATA controller without compromising delivery schedules. The solution offers several key benefits:

* Easy-to-use configuration tool means users are able to parameterize their SATA HDD or CD/DVD drive quickly and start their SoC verification as soon as possible.
* Productive debug environment provides access to low-level transactions to detect those hard-to-find bugs.
* High-speed data accesses to allow loading or unloading of GBytes of data in minutes rather than hours.
* Compliant to SATA 2.6 standard.

The iSolve SATA solution can be used with traditional in-circuit emulation (ICE) as well as a high-performance transaction-based acceleration mode of operation.

The ability to mix and match traditional ICE capabilities with high-performance, transaction-based acceleration facilitates the smooth transition from simulation-centric use models to in-circuit emulation. The solution is available for deployment at customer sites effective immediately.