I\u2019ve been thinking about my 6.5 years at Mentor\u2019s emulation division, and looking back, I have seen tremendous changes in many things; customers, products, and verification methods \u2014 but probably the biggest change I notice is the sheer scale in our portfolio of emulation solutions we now offer. Back in 2005, we had a handful of them, whereas now we offer around fifty, covering applications such as video\/audio, networking, wireless, storage, memories, CPUs, and bus protocol standards.<\/p>\n
An Italian colleague calls them \u201csolution tomatoes\u201d, because our customers use them with emulation in the same way tomatoes are used in Italian cooking \u2014 everywhere! That demands a big effort from us, not just to maintain support for existing protocol standards, but also to keep an eye out for the emerging standards our leading-edge emulation customers need for the verification of their complex SoCs.<\/p>\n
About a year ago, we started a new area \u2014 virtual solutions. For years, customers have craved a software solution with the same functionality as in-circuit emulation (ICE) hardware applications, but without the hardware itself \u2014 since the latter is troublesome to set up, limits the flexibility of deployment across multiple teams, and can require a lot of management, especially in cabling to the emulator. A few years ago I visited a customer\u2019s lab and was amazed by the setup required for the dozens of hardware solutions they had connected to our Veloce emulator. I was reminded of a TV ad I saw years ago with Monty Python\u2019s John Cleese, who was promoting a new hi-fi\/TV system, saying the benefits were that \u201cyou don\u2019t have a plateful of spaghetti hanging out the back.\u201d How true. It\u2019s a pity we couldn\u2019t offer a software version back then for those customers.<\/p>\n
So the virtual lab idea was born, with software-only solutions providing the same functionality as traditional ICE products. These are now coming on-line at Mentor for important applications such as video\/audio, networking, bus protocols, and so on. We named these liberating technologies VirtuaLAB. It satisfies our customers\u2019 requests for a virtual lab to conduct their verification, using large, server-based Veloce emulators to deliver massive numbers of verification cycles from a remote center. Users can sit at their desks and perform all the required setup, control, test, debug, and analysis tasks without ever having to touch any hardware.<\/p>\n
VirtuaLAB is a tremendous step forward. It delivers an environment that is less error-prone during setup and reproducible and shareable across verification teams and multiple applications. So, thanks to this innovation, verification of multi-chip standards has come a long way in 6.5 years \u2014 and there\u2019s no more spaghetti hanging out the back of the emulator.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Richard Pugh reflects on efforts to cut through the tangle of cables and make emulation easier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4408,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[1047,757],"coauthors":[284],"class_list":["post-1137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-design-verification","tag-emulation","tag-rtl","workflow-expert-blog","workflow-op-ed","organization-mentor-graphics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1137\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1137"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}