Mentor Graphics announces first IP to system, UPF-based low-power verification solution

USA: Mentor Graphics Corp. announced availability of the first, comprehensive IP to System, UPF-based low-power verification flow.

The IEEE-1801 UPF (Unified Power Format) has emerged as the low- power standard that enables designers to specify a design’s power intent separately from the design itself ensuring reuse, portability and greater flexibility in power management techniques.

Mentor now has platform-level support of UPF in both the Questa functional verification platform and the Veloce family of hardware emulators that lets users create a single specification for power intent that is reusable and consistent, and facilitates low-power verification across simulation, formal and emulation.

“Power management is a critical aspect of nearly all complex designs today and impacts the entire design and verification flow. UPF enables reusable and early verification of power management architectures and ensures implementation consistent with the specification of power intent,” said Erich Marschner, vice-chair of the IEEE P1801 UPF Working Group and verification architect at Mentor Graphics.

“Mentor Graphics has taken a leading role both in driving the UPF standard and working in parallel to deliver a comprehensive and open UPF-based solution with Questa verification and Veloce emulation. Together they deliver increased simulation performance, new power intent debug, low-power clock domain crossing verification and low-power emulation, enabling users to thoroughly verify and debug all low-power aspects of their design in a manageable IP/block to system methodology.”

Advanced Simulation, Visualization and Debug: The latest Questa release delivers up to a 6X boost in UPF simulation performance, which provides the horsepower needed to verify the integration of a subsystem or full chip with its power management architecture.

This performance, combined with the new power intent visibility in the Questa GUI and automatic low-power checks, enables users to easily and completely verify, visualize and debug all effects of adding the UPF to both RTL and gate level simulations. The Questa functional verification platform also introduces new automatic low-power coverage metrics and the generation of a low-power test plan making it easy to include power management coverage points to a comprehensive coverage closure strategy.

The latest release improves support and compatibility for the open Liberty library format, which provides a smooth flow between low-power synthesis and implementation.

Low-power Clock Domain Crossing Verification: With the growing number of clocks in complex SoCs, clock domain crossing verification has become critical to detect clock interaction issues that cannot be detected in simulation-based techniques.

As UPF introduces power intent logic that could potentially be inserted in paths that cross clock domain boundaries, Questa CDC now reads the UPF to automatically detect errors injected by this additional logic, therefore ensuring low-power clock domain crossing verification.

Verifying Power Control Software: The early validation of software-based power control state machines requires the performance of hardware emulation. The Veloce emulator now delivers the most comprehensive UPF support for low-power emulation. It also automatically synthesizes the UPF power intent logic and performs dynamic checks for monitoring low-power functionality, alerting users to cases of incorrect low-power behavior. Veloce now makes it possible to run application-level software in power critical scenarios.

“Veloce with UPF delivers the performance and capacity needed to validate power management software,” said Eric Selosse, VP and GM, Mentor Emulation Division. “Verification and debug of this code is critical to achieving optimal battery life on mobile devices.”

"For design teams looking for ways to reduce power, the greatest impact can be made by implementing a low-power strategy at RTL and above,” said Shawn McCloud, VP of marketing, Calypto Design Systems. “It is exciting to see that Mentor Graphics has leveraged the UPF standard to create a new low-power flow enabling companies to more readily adopt low-power methodologies early in the design and verification cycle where the biggest impact can be made.”