CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
22 June 2004
Product News
EVE Unveils ZeBu-XL, the Electronics Industry's First High-End Prototyping Solution
Emulation and Verification Engineering (EVE) announced immediate availability of ZeBu-XL, a high-end prototyping platform for large System-on-Chip (SoC) designs with advanced features such as automated design mapping and the ability to support interactive hardware debugging.
Priced at pennies per gate, ZeBu-XL is compatible with previous generations of EVE's ZeBu-ZV (for " zero bugs ") hardware-assisted verification platform and associated software. It adds a thirty-fold increase in capacity from one-and-half million application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) gates for a single ZeBu-ZV board to 48 million for ZeBu-XL and runs at megahertz speeds. Currently, one project team is using a fully configured version of ZeBu-XL on a complex processor design.
"ZeBu-XL fills the capacity and performance gap in the hardware-assisted verification market between roll-your-own prototypes and expensive hardware emulators, " explains Luc Burgun, EVE's president and chief executive officer (CEO) " We are also making a case for the lowest global 'cost-per-gate' that is based on system price and hidden costs due to setup time that engineers use for hardware debugging and software development. We're able to prove there is a better way with ZeBu-XL. "
ZeBu-XL Features
ZeBu-XL is the first prototyping platform that allows design and verification teams to implement a fast hardware model for complex SoCs with more than five millions ASIC gates in a reasonable amount of time.
It is a high-speed, high-capacity prototyping platform based on the latest Xilinx Virtex-II 8000 field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). It boasts the industry's largest capacity with up to 64 FPGAs, corresponding to 48 million ASIC gates in a single 19-inch rack box. It also rates a maximum performance of 30MHz in stand-alone or in-circuit emulation modes, with a memory capacity of up to 1.5GB.
Integrated with the most popular FPGA and ASIC synthesizers, ZeBu-XL comes with a complete compilation software suite that includes automatic gate-level partitioning, automatic clock processing, and a memory generator. These features permit fast design compilation and incremental compilation as well. Further, ZeBu-XL implements patented reconfigurable testbench (RTB) technology that permits to switch between stimulation modes without recompiling the device under test.
Like ZeBu-ZV, ZeBu-XL offers various stimulation modes including hardware description language (HDL) co-simulation, C/C++ co-simulation at cycle or transaction level, pattern mode for regression testing and stand-alone and in-circuit emulation. All these stimulation modes can be simultaneously combined together to provide maximum flexibility and performance.
ZeBu-XL supports hardware/software integration and embedded software validation. By connecting a software debugger to a CPU or digital signal processor (DSP) modeled either as a soft core mapped into the emulator or a logic tile/hard core mounted on a module inside the system, ZeBu-XL performs at several MHz speed.
Finally, ZeBu-XL features multiple interactive hardware debugging features, including flexible software logic analysis, continuous internal state capture, memory and register read and write, and save and restore. It offers a powerful built-in logic analyzer for fast hardware logic analysis on all I/O pins and static probes at up to 12MHz, and on-the-fly monitoring via unique dynamic probes at full speed.
ZeBu-XL is currently shipping at a starting price of $120,000.
More details can be found at: http://www.eve-team.com
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