Design
Aldec Supports Altera's Stratix III Devices
Aldec, Inc has announced System Verification Environment (SVE) support for Altera Corporation's new high-end Stratix III FPGA device family. SVE supports all aspects of system-level design development and verification. It includes an industry-leading common kernel HDL simulator, a set of on-line debuggers, code coverage, cross-probing tools and an industry-first integrated simulator server farm manager (SFM) for automatic verification of ultra-large system-level designs.
Aldemigration path for validating Stratix III designs, stated Dr. Stanley M. Hyduke, CEO of Aldec, Inc. The relationship between our companies continues to grow and we look forward to supporting our mutual customers on the next generation of Stratix designs.
Engineers designing with Stratix III devices have a broad range of system-level requirements, including intellectual property integration and multi-language support. In addition to meeting these requirements, Stratix III devices can accommodate multiple processors, memories and peripheral devices, said Danny Biran, vice president of product and corporate marketing at Altera. Engineers can then use the Aldec SVE solution to accelerate the verification cycle for their Stratix III designs.
To speed verification and debugging of Stratix III designs, SVE can also handle OVA, PSL and SVA (System Verilog) assertion languages. Language templates and predefined test suites ease testing requirements for system-level designs.
The newest trend in design automation is the use of code coverage driven intelligent test benches. However, such test benches require a considerably larger number of simulators than the traditional test benches. To handle a large number of test vectors and simulation results, Aldec has developed a
server farm manager for Stratix III FPGAs capable of handling thousands of simulators in a highly efficient manner over corporate networks.
The SFM performs numerous operations and functions on design files such as running complex flows on multiple machines, storing, managing and comparing verification results, providing error reports and statistical summaries, optimizing license utilization, automatic network reconfiguration in case
of failed nodes, and optimizing the usage of corporate computer power. The SFM option runs on 64-bit Linux simulation server farms and handles mixed designs and test benches written in VHDL, Verilog, SystemVerilog and SystemC.
SVE will be available in January 2007, and will incorporate system-level verification products to facilitate validation of high-end Stratix III devices.