EVE Unveils ZeBu-XL, the Electronics Industry's First High-End Prototyping Solution

Boasts Up to 48 Millions ASIC Gates At MHz Speed and Pennies Per Gate

Palaiseau (France) - September 6, 2004 –– Emulation and Verification Engineering (EVE) today announced immediate availability of ZeBu-XL, a high-end prototyping platform for large System-on-Chip (SoC) designs with advanced features such as automated design mapping and the ability to support interactive hardware debugging.

Priced at pennies per gate, ZeBu-XL is compatible with previous generations of EVE’s ZeBu-ZV (for “ zero bugs ”) hardware-assisted verification platform and associated software. It adds a thirty-fold increase in capacity from one-and-half million application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) gates for a single ZeBu-ZV board to 48 million for ZeBu-XL and runs at megahertz speeds. Currently, one project team is using a fully configured version of ZeBu-XL on a complex processor design.

“ ZeBu-XL fills the capacity and performance gap in the hardware-assisted verification market between roll-your-own prototypes and expensive hardware emulators, ” explains Luc Burgun, EVE’s President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) “ We are also making a case for the lowest global ‘cost-per-gate’ that is based on system price and hidden costs due to setup time that engineers use for hardware debugging and software development. We’re able to prove there is a better way with ZeBu-XL. ”

ZeBu-XL Features

ZeBu-XL is the first prototyping platform that allows design and verification teams to implement a fast hardware model for complex SoCs with more than five millions ASIC gates in a reasonable amount of time. It does not require an army of experts specialized in prototyping technologies.

It is a high-speed, high-capacity prototyping platform based on the latest Xilinx Virtex-II 8000 field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). It boasts the industry’s largest capacity with up to 64 FPGAs, corresponding to 48 million ASIC gates in a single 19-inch rack box. It also rates a maximum performance of 30MHz in stand-alone or in-circuit emulation modes, with a memory capacity of up to 1.5GB.

Integrated with the most popular FPGA and ASIC synthesizers, ZeBu-XL comes with a complete compilation software suite that includes automatic gate-level partitioning, automatic clock processing, and a memory generator.

These features permit fast design compilation and incremental compilation as well. Further, ZeBu-XL implements patented reconfigurable testbench (RTB) technology that permits to switch between stimulation modes without recompiling the device under test.

Like ZeBu-ZV, ZeBu-XL offers various stimulation modes including hardware description language (HDL) co-simulation, C/C++ co-simulation at cycle or transaction level, pattern mode for regression testing and stand-alone and in-circuit emulation. All these stimulation modes can be simultaneously combined together to provide maximum flexibility and performance.

ZeBu-XL supports hardware/software integration and embedded software validation. By connecting a software debugger to a CPU or digital signal processor (DSP) modeled either as a soft core mapped into the emulator or a logic tile/hard core mounted on a module inside the system, ZeBu-XL performs at several MHz speed.

Finally, ZeBu-XL features multiple interactive hardware debugging features, including flexible software logic analysis, continuous internal state capture, memory and register read and write, and save and restore. It offers a powerful built-in logic analyzer for fast hardware logic analysis on all I/O pins and static probes at up to 12MHz, and on-the-fly monitoring via unique dynamic probes at full speed.

Pricing and Availability

ZeBu-XL is currently shipping at a starting price of $120,000. For more information and details can be found at the EVE website located at: http://www.eve-team.com.

About Emulation and Verification Engineering

<>EVE offers innovative intellectual property (IP) and hardware-assisted verification solutions and verification engineering services that accelerate the design of complex integrated circuits, prevalent in the communications, wireless, networking, computer, and consumer product markets. It has offices in Palaiseau, France and in San Jose, Calif. (USA)