Mentor aims to grow emulation with lower gate-count hardware
Mentor, a Siemens business, is looking to expand the use of the hardware emulator on designs with comparative lower-gate counts through additions to its flagship Veloce Strato emulation family.
The company has today (April 5) launched the Veloce StratoT and StratoTiL with, respectively, 1.25 billion-gate and 640,000-gate capacities. They join the 2.5 billion-gate StratoM emulator launched last year.
The company says that the new smaller gate-count emulators complete the roll-out of the Strato family, while support for legacy Quattro (256 million-gate) and Maximus (one billion-gate) hardware will continue.
The latest Strato emulator units are modular. Customers can progressively add boxes to an installation until they bring their gate capacity up to that of a full StratoM.
The Strato emulator family can now be grown with modules toward 2.5 billion gates (Mentor)
One significant part of Mentor’s lower gate-count strategy involves the promotion of emulation, long seen as a richer design player’s technology, as an option for companies that might previously have seen FPGA prototyping as a more cost-effective verification option.
It is then specifically targeting four market segments where its Veloce family does not already hold the market-leading position: automotive, mil/aero, mobile and storage.
The launch also builds upon the February acquisition by parent company Siemens of Finnish test specialist Sarokal Test Systems. Sarokal has a particular mobile specialization in the development of 5G networks. The overriding concept is to integrate emulation and test here within a broad design flow for pre- and post-silicon validation.
Siemens is also now promoting Mentor’s emulation family as a key plank within its Industry 4.0 strategy for automotive ‘digital twin’ design flows.
The biggest new addition to Mentor’s emulation family, the StratoT, has 17kW power consumption within a 2.3-rack data-center placement. The emulator is air-cooled with 32-board capacity. All existing Veloce tools and apps are compatible with the new emulators.
