EVE Adds Fast Synthesis Capabilities to ZeBu Emulator

New Tool Meant to Synthesize Large Designs Quickly and with Greater Visibility

SAN JOSE, CALIF. –– January 19, 2009 –– EVE, the leader in hardware/software co-verification, today announced that it will offer synthesis capabilities known as zFAST (ZeBu FAst SynThesis) to handle large designs with a top-down and bottom-up approach targeting its ZeBu (for Zero Bugs) emulation systems.

“Only an FPGA-based emulator can save the day when it comes to full system validation,” remarks Lauro Rizzatti, EVE-USA’s General Manager and Marketing Vice-President. “New designs reach tens of millions of ASIC-equivalent gates, with processor and graphics designs moving well into several hundreds of millions gates. Mapping such large designs into a large array of FPGAs break many commercial FPGA synthesis tools. zFAST was developed for these types of designs.”

Supporting all three major design languages –– VHDL, Verilog and SystemVerilog ––, zFAST typically runs over one order of magnitude faster than best-in-class field programmable gate array (FPGA) synthesis. It can map large designs with a small increase in area compared to equivalent tools. zFAST can be parallelized on several PCs, further accelerating the synthesis process and enabling design teams to complete a large synthesis job in minutes instead of several hours.

Unlike other synthesis tools with limited control over optimizations and the garbling of signal names that can occur, zFAST keeps register transfer level (RTL) signals so that ZeBu can generate VCD/FSDB/VPD waveform files with RTL signal names. zFAST supports bottom-up –– or module-by-module –– synthesis, as well as top-down synthesis. Further, it includes ZW-FPGA synthesizable library for FPGA components, namely RTL models for the most common Synopsys’ DesignWare® Library components.

zFAST is tightly integrated with zCUI, the ZeBu Compilation User Interface, and the use model for zFAST is the same as for commercial FPGA synthesis tools.

The ZeBu compiler will continue to support commercial FPGA synthesis tools for small and medium size designs requiring high-speed runtime performance or compatibility with an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) prototyping flow.

Pricing and Availability

zFAST is available now as an add-on feature for ZeBu. It is priced from $50,000 for the first license, and from $15,000 for additional licenses.

About EVE

EVE is the worldwide leader in hardware/software co-verification solutions, including hardware description language (HDL) acceleration and extremely fast emulation.
EVE products significantly shorten the overall verification cycle of complex integrated circuits and electronic systems designs.
Its products also work in conjunction with popular Verilog, SystemVerilog, and VHDL-based software simulators from Synopsys, Cadence Design Systems and Mentor Graphics.
Email: info@eve-team.com - Website: http://www.eve-team.com