AUSTIN, Texas--(Business Wire)--
In today's design centers, designing, verifying, implementing and
producing ICs is increasingly difficult - approaching the impossible.
Functional failures continue to account for more that 70% of silicon
re-spins. To verify state-of-the art designs like NetEffect's advanced
networking adapter chip, new verification approaches must be taken to
meet shrinking design schedules and increase functionality. Breker's
Coverage Model approach to verification meets these needs by reducing
the testbench development effort while increasing verification
efficiency and accuracy.
The NetEffect IC design is a complex set of pipelined state
machines that implement the full set of IETF-approved iWARP extensions
to TCP/IP for both 10GbE and 1GbE. The various protocols can run
simultaneously to provide application acceleration for networking,
storage and clustering traffic. This low-power, high-performance
design and a compressed timeline proved to be challenging for both the
design and verification processes.
Breker Verification Systems was selected to assist NetEffect in
the verification process because of the efficiencies incorporated in
Breker's Trek technology. Trek utilizes graph-based Coverage Models to
automate the generation of self-checking scenarios and sequences
needed to meet NetEffect's functional verification requirements.
NetEffect Design Process
At NetEffect, the design and verification processes incorporated a
number of tools and methodologies including SystemC for behavioral
modeling, RTL implementation and FPGA verification. Trek was initially
used in the early stages of verification to ensure the integrity of
NetEffect's SystemC behavioral models. In this process, Trek's
Coverage Models were incrementally created, supplying test cases to
the existing testbench with scenarios ranging from simple tests to
concurrent packet streams that stressed the boundaries of the design.
As design progressed to RTL implementation, the Trek user was able
to reuse the SystemC verification environment and the associated
Coverage Models for verification. This eliminated significant delays
typically associated with re-creating the verification environment for
the RTL.
Because Trek Coverage Models can be reused in vertical and
horizontal testbench applications, Breker customers typically realize
a 95% reuse factor for these Models. With each Coverage Model applied
to different environments, additional constraints can be added to
reflect specific application-based design goals.
"In both the SystemC and RTL verification efforts, Breker's Trek
product was able to help us find deep state functional bugs quickly
and efficiently," said Terry Hulett, VP of Engineering at NetEffect.
"The engineering team continues to 'Brekerize' the latest design
revisions."
Results
With the assistance of Breker tools, NetEffect received fully
functional first silicon on time. The design returned from the
foundry, and within three days of receiving silicon, network packets
were running through the design, exercising the targeted
functionality. This is the design that NetEffect is distributing in
production lots today.
About Breker
Breker Verification Systems is an EDA (electronic design
automation) company that is bridging the gap between verification
planning and the testbench using Coverage Model-Based Functional Test
Synthesis. Breker has created a functional test synthesis tool used to
develop functional verification tests for complex designs. This
solution makes the process of understanding, defining and analyzing
complicated verification requirements easy and systematic, using a
visual graph based verification plan. By generating tests directly
from the plan, the tool reduces verification effort by 11-14x while
guaranteeing 100% verification plan coverage. Visit
www.brekersystems.com for more information.
About NetEffect
NetEffect is a network connectivity solutions company providing
high-performance, low-power multi-gigabit accelerated Ethernet
products. Using a unique patented architecture, NetEffect products
deliver the highest Ethernet performance in the industry while
dramatically reducing latency and networking overhead on host
processors for a wide range of data center applications. A single
NetEffect adapter handles all data communications traffic -
networking, storage, and clustering saving space, power, and
simplifying deployment and infrastructure. NetEffect products are
fully compatibility with existing Ethernet infrastructure in any data
center. Visit http://www.neteffect.com for more information.
Breker Verifications Systems
Rick Nordin, 512-289-7788
rick.nordin@brekersystems.com
or
Lee PR
Ed Lee, 650-363-0142
ed@leepr.com
Copyright Business Wire 2008
