Qualcomm Adopts GateRocket Solution to Address FPGA Complexity Challenges

Update: GateRocket Inc. has ceased operations (August 2011)

Wireless leader deploys RocketDrive®, RocketVision®  to reduce verification time, streamline debug

BEDFORD, MA – April 20, 2010 – GateRocket, Inc., the leading supplier of verification and debug solutions for advanced FPGAs, today announced that Qualcomm, Incorporated (Nasdaq: QCOM), has adopted its RocketDrive® and RocketVision® products to address the increasing complexity of the FPGAs and ASICs its engineering teams are developing.

Qualcomm adopted GateRocket after a comprehensive internal evaluation of the product’s capabilities, particularly in the area of simulation acceleration. Initial evaluations resulted in improvements of 2-11X with limited impact on their existing verification flows. The company uses FPGAs extensively in prototyping large ASIC designs which often requires many FPGAs to be used as a prototyping platform. Performing long serial test sequences for such large-scale designs can run for days and are difficult to partition into smaller design portions. Design teams will use the GateRocket products on their FPGA prototypes as a way to more efficiently verify and debug internally developed IP, as well as system-level designs that will ultimately be implemented as ASICs.

“We’re expecting GateRocket to help us streamline the verification process by accelerating logic simulation for the FPGAs and reducing the number of errors we find in the lab, all without disrupting our current design flow,” said Steve LoCicero, Senior Director of Engineering at Qualcomm. “The result is a much more efficient verification process for FPGA designs. We are pleased with the design cycle reductions made possible by GateRocket, and their support team has been extremely responsive in helping us adopt this approach.”

A Streamlined, Interactive Verification Process

Qualcomm can achieve silicon-level accuracy through the RocketDrive verification system which allows them to simulate their designs within the context of the FPGA device they are using. RocketDrive works seamlessly with Qualcomm’s functional verification environment, and allows designers to move effortlessly between RTL and the FPGA being targeted, combining actual FPGA hardware and RTL simulation models in the same verification run. This technique provides engineers with the ability to make a change to one RTL block and re-run it along with the hardware representations of the other blocks, thereby avoiding the need to rebuild the FPGA for each fix and enabling multiple design-change-debug iterations in a single day.

About GateRocket

GateRocket, Inc., located in Bedford, Mass., offers electronic engineers the first Device Native ® verification and debug solution for advanced FPGA semiconductor devices. The company’s RocketVision® software debug tool and its RocketDrive hardware verification system enables users to verify and debug advanced FPGA designs faster and with higher quality for greatly improved time-to-market, and realize more reliable and predictable results. Learn more about GateRocket online at www.gaterocket.com and sign up for a free webinar.

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