In March 2016, Synopsys announced the patented VCS Cheetah technology that enables FGP in simulation by utilizing many-core CPU architectures. With VCS 2017.03, this breakthrough technology as well as additional performance optimizations, have been integrated and are native to the simulation engines; therefore, no changes or disruption to the existing simulation flows are required. The performance gains can be achieved on existing x86 CPU server platforms and further optimized for user-specific hardware configurations. All existing VCS features such as NLP, X-Propagation simulation, and Verdi® debug with parallel FSDB continue to work as before with no changes necessary to the design or testbenches. Furthermore, intelligent native FGP in VCS delivers the performance boost with minimal impact on compile time and memory usage.
Synopsys is hosting a webinar on February 21, 2017, to provide further technical details on VCS 2017.03 performance innovations, including the native fine-grained parallelism technology and its highly practical use model. Registration for this webinar is available at www.synopsys.com/VCS-FGP.
"The VCS functional verification solution has led the industry in simulation performance for more than 20 years," said Manoj Gandhi, executive vice president and general manager of the Verification Group at Synopsys. "We are excited to once again deliver the next wave of simulation performance natively in VCS. We look forward to continued R&D collaborations with industry leaders to drive innovation in our Verification Continuum Platform."
Availability
General availability of VCS 2017.03 is planned in March 2017. Cadence Incisive and Mentor Questa users interested in joining the FastForward Program should contact their Synopsys representatives.
The Verification FastForward Program
The Verification FastForward Program includes technical services, training and expert verification support. Established in 2011, the program has enabled numerous verification teams to migrate to the VCS solution and has significantly improved their verification performance, effectiveness and productivity. These teams span market segments, company sizes, and geographies and are working on diverse design sizes, verification methodologies and technology nodes.