Synopsys unveils Verification Continuum

MOUNTAIN VIEW, USA: Synopsys Inc. announced the Synopsys Verification Continuum platform to accelerate industry innovation for earlier software bring-up and shorter time-to-market for advanced SoCs.

Verification Continuum is built from Synopsys' market-leading and fastest verification technologies providing virtual prototyping, static and formal verification, simulation, emulation, FPGA-based prototyping and debug in a unified environment with verification IP, planning and coverage technology. Verification Continuum introduces Unified Compile with VCS and Unified Debug with Verdi across the verification flow, speeding time-to-market by months for complex SoC designs.

"AMD's advanced multi-core Accelerated Processor Unit designs require a continuum of verification technologies working seamlessly together to meet growing hardware and software verification requirements," said Alex Starr, fellow and pre-silicon solutions architect at AMD.

"Synopsys Verification Continuum represents an important new direction for the industry, and our initial evaluation of the technology indicates it can accelerate design schedules with a more efficient and scalable platform optimized for complex SoC verification and early software bring-up."

The mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) markets are driving dramatic increases in SoC complexity and software content along with intensifying time-to-market pressure. To address these challenges, SoC teams require many verification technologies such as simulation, emulation and prototyping across the spectrum of pre-silicon verification, post-silicon validation and early software bring-up.

Today, engineers spend months of effort in design bring-up and transition effort between disjoint technologies, further complicated by the need to debug across domains and to support large software teams. To shorten SoC time-to-market, leading teams are adopting "shift-left" strategies with concurrent practices across pre-silicon verification, post-silicon validation and software bring-up.

Synopsys' Verification Continuum enables these shift-left strategies with best-in-class verification technologies unified with seamless design bring-up, transition and debug throughout the flow.

Industry's fastest verification engines
Synopsys' Verification Continuum is built from the industry's fastest verification engines including Virtualizer virtual prototyping, Verification Compiler static and formal technologies, VCS simulation, ZeBu emulation, HAPS FPGA-based prototyping and Verdi3 debug.

These best-in-class technologies provide the performance and capacity that industry leaders depend on to verify many of the world's largest and most complex chips.

Unified compile with industry-leading VCS
Verification Continuum features Unified Compile based on the mature VCS simulator front-end, providing a robust simulation-like user experience across the verification flow, that enables engineers to easily transition between simulation, static and formal verification, emulation, FPGA-based prototyping and debug as required by the verification task.

Existing flows based on individual point tools require extensive setup for each tool in the flow, and weeks or months of effort to move a design between different tools based on varying language support or other requirements. Unified Compile with VCS eliminates this redundant work, saving months of effort in typical project schedules.

Unified debug with Verdi
Unified Debug based on Synopsys' Verdi3 environment provides a consistent debug user experience across the verification flow, optimized with Verification Continuum technologies for even higher productivity. Verdi3 has long been recognized as the leading open debug platform, and as part of the Verification Continuum, it provides a single interface for multi-domain debug across virtual prototyping, static and formal verification, simulation, emulation and FPGA-based prototyping.

Since bugs may exist on the boundary between traditional verification domains, Verdi3 also enables fully synchronized, mixed-abstraction debug between SPICE, RTL, transactions and software.

Scalable FPGA-based emulation and prototyping
As SoC complexity and software content increase, leading SoC development teams have concluded that commercial FPGA-based hardware-assisted verification is the best, most scalable approach to meet the growing demand for high-performance platforms for early software bring-up and SoC verification.

Verification Continuum integrates FPGA-based emulation and prototyping seamlessly into mainstream verification flows, helping to save weeks to months in design bring-up time compared with earlier approaches. Verification Continuum's Unified Compile technology has been architected to support FPGA-based verification platforms, delivering up to 3X faster compile time for Synopsys' ZeBu Server-3 emulation system.

"The Verification Continuum requires an optimized software flow combined with the highest-performance, highest-capacity emulation and prototyping hardware," said Victor Peng, executive VP and GM of the Programmable Products Group at Xilinx. "Xilinx has raised the bar again with our Virtex® UltraScale devices, offering the largest 20nm FPGA in the industry, the XCVU440. We are working closely with Synopsys to optimize our Vivado® Design Suite flow to address the unique requirements of hardware-assisted verification users."

"Synopsys' Verification Continuum, developed in close collaboration with market leaders, will enable a new era of SoC verification for the industry," said Manoj Gandhi, senior VP and GM of the Verification Group at Synopsys. "The significant verification R&D investments Synopsys has made over the past two years are already showing promising early results towards helping customers reduce time-to-market by months for advanced SoC designs."

Early availability is scheduled for December 2014, with general availability in 2015.