TransEDA Announces Automatic Verification for AMBA AXI-Based Designs

Los Gatos CA, Eastleigh UK, and Paris France, May 3rd, 2005 – TransEDA, the leader in coverage and ready-to-use verification solutions for electronic hardware designs, today announces the availability of imPROVE-HPK AXI, an automated formal verification solution dedicated to the verification of designs using the AMBA AXI (Advanced eXtensible Interface) protocol.
 
Background

Today’s complex SoC designs are often made of multiple IP blocks connected together via a communications bus that obeys a well defined protocol. This bus can be considered to be the back bone of the chip: a failure in the communication between IPs usually leads to a non functioning circuit.

It is therefore critical to pay special attention to the verification of the communication interface of all IPs connected to the bus, to ensure that they are all fully compliant with the chosen protocol. This is not easy to achieve using traditional dynamic verification methods, because of the complexity of the protocols and the very large number of configurations that must be checked.

On the other hand, formal verification is particularly well suited to addressing this problem: IP blocks are of a size that can readily be handled by a formal engine, and both the protocol properties and the environment can be automatically derived from a small number of parameters provided by the designer. This easy and automatic verification of hardware protocols is provided by TransEDA in the imPROVE-HPK solutions.
 
Product overview

The AMBA AXI Hardware Protocol Kit (HPK) automates the verification of AXI compliant hardware designs and adds to the existing range of TransEDA HPKs for AMBA AHB and APB, OCP1.0 and OCP2.0, PCI and PCI-X.

Providing over 150 coverage scenarios, more than 100 properties, worst-case performance analysis and support for multiple-interface designs, the use of imPROVE-HPK AXI saves weeks of modelling time by automatically creating complete protocol environments around your design to provide fast, accurate and exhaustive verification.

Protocol violations caused by design bugs are swiftly identified and counter-examples - generated in VCD format, or as Verilog or VHDL test benches - allow speedy targeting and resolution of any design problems.

Benefits

Easily integrated into your existing design flow, imPROVE-HPK is straight forward to use with a reduced learning curve, thanks to a comprehensive GUI that uses graphical wizards to setup the DUT environment.

Used early in a project to qualify IP blocks, or later on to verify the protocol layer of the complete bus,  imPROVE-HPKs will save you time and money by speeding up the design verification phase and getting you to tape-out sooner.

Pricing and Availability

imPROVE-HPK AXI is available for immediate shipment, starting at $21K for a yearly subscription. It is supported on the following platforms and operating systems:

• SUN Solaris 7 and above
• Red Hat Linux 7.2 and above.

 About TransEDA

 TransEDA is a leading provider of coverage and ready-to-use verification solutions for electronic designs. The company has over twelve years experience of operating in the EDA market.

 TransEDA provides advanced verification and verification closure measurement solutions including code coverage with coverability analysis capability, specification coverage and impact analysis, configurable HDL rule checking with automatic formal checks, static assertion verification, automatic bus protocol checking, verification IP with bus-based system-level test automation, test suite optimization and transistor-level functional abstraction.

 TransEDA is part of the Valiosys Group and has offices in North America, Europe and Japan, plus local representatives in China, India, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan.

For more information, visit www.transeda.com.

TransEDA, the TransEDA logo and Verification from Concept to Reality are registered trademarks of TransEDA Technology Ltd. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.