CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
3 August 2009
Implementation Investments
Nethra Enlists Cadence Incisive Palladium Accelerator/Emulator To Speed Development of Advanced HD Image Processor
Cadence Design Systems, Inc. announced that Nethra Imaging, Inc. reduced the development time of a high-definition (HD) image processor design using the Cadence® Incisive® Palladium® II Accelerator/Emulator. Productivity improvements that Nethra experienced with the Palladium product enabled the company to boost design quality and confidence while meeting an ambitious development deadline.
The adoption and rapid deployment of the Palladium II system for the HD image processor ASIC containing more than 25 million gates enabled Nethra’s engineering team to accelerate system-level verification for a leading-edge camera application. According to Nethra, system-level and subsystem verification was able to achieve 507KHz to 1.3MHz, depending on runtime environments and conditions. With simulation only, verification ran at about 30Hz; accelerated with the Palladium system, Nethra achieved an increase in acceleration 4 orders higher in magnitude at the full chip level.
“The overall productivity gained from Palladium II has dramatically improved our ability to validate our next-generation HD image processor,” said Kasturi Rangam, Nethra’s director of engineering. “The impact of the Palladium II technology was immediate. We went from waiting seven days to process just two HD frames to processing over 120 frames in an hour.”
In addition, the Palladium system’s productivity features, such as runtime checkers, enabled Nethra to pinpoint design issues quickly. Nethra uncovered several artifacts that would have been harder to find without running hundreds of HD frames with system-level stimulus, namely SPI, DDR3, SATA and 10G Ethernet. The Palladium system’s fast and deterministic compiler, along with the integrated FullVision debugger, were vital for easy bring-up, use and debug.
“We chose the Palladium system for its superior performance, which allowed us to meet our aggressive development schedule and deliver the highest quality HD image processing chip,” said Krishnan Iyer, Nethra’s vice president of engineering. “In addition, the tight support from the Cadence team made the deployment process flawless.”
“Cadence system verification solutions and technologies continue to provide dependability to successful companies such as Nethra,” said Ran Avinun, marketing group director of Cadence system design and verification. “The Palladium system again demonstrated its value through verification acceleration that helped increase productivity, quality and overall confidence.”
About Nethra
Nethra Imaging is a fabless semiconductor company focused on delivering imaging and video solutions for a wide range of applications in the broadcast, medical, surveillance and military markets. The company uses proprietary algorithms to build flexible, fully programmable image processors and related products. Located in Santa Clara, California, Nethra is privately-held and since its inception in 2003, has developed scalable image processing solutions for a variety of video and multimedia applications. For more information, visit www.nethra.us.com.
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