Synopsys Mixed-signal Verification Solution Delivers 5X Speed-up at Amlogic

Using CustomSim and VCS®, Amlogic observed a 5X improvement in verification throughput compared with competitive solutions, helping to reduce the typical SoC verification cycle from five days to 21 hours.

Amlogic's new AML8726-M multimedia SoC combines our proprietary HD multimedia processing engine with ARM® Cortex™-A9 MPCore CPU and Mali™-400MP GPU cores, setting a new standard for high-performance SoCs, said Mike Yip, vice president of Engineering at Amlogic. Synopsys enabled us to meet aggressive tapeout schedules by reducing our chip-level mixed-signal verification time by more than 5X with CustomSim and VCS while ensuring high-quality verification.

CustomSim, an integral part of Synopsys' Discovery™ Verification Platform, unifies the best-in-class NanoSim®, HSIM® and XA FastSPICE technologies with added multi-threading capabilities for high-capacity, high-performance circuit simulation. For full-chip mixed-signal verification, CustomSim is tightly coupled to the VCS functional verification solution through Direct Kernel Integration and is integrated into a unified analog/mixed-signal (AMS) verification environment, simplifying usability through a common set of inputs, outputs and device models.

Designers have consistently ranked mixed-signal SoC verification throughput as one of their top areas to improve, said Bijan Kiani, vice president of product marketing at Synopsys. The combination of CustomSim and VCS delivers the performance and capacity needed to run full-chip mixed-signal verification of multi-million-gate designs, allowing our customers to shorten tapeout schedules and increase confidence in verification quality.