If you have been living in the US for the last few years (if not, I have a treat for you) and have paid any attention to TV ads, you've probably seen the AT&T Bigger is Better commercials, where an adult interviews a group of young children about which qualities are important to them.
The mantra is that bigger, faster, more is better. We all know that this is not always the case. However, in verification we know that a simulation can never be fast enough.
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As design complexities grow, you need more and more complex tests. You need more machines and you struggle with your available resources. This struggle is dangerous because it might impact both the quality as well as the productivity of your verification efforts.
If you miss a bug because you did not run that all-important test, you are in big trouble. If you wrote the entire set of required tests, but your iteration time is too slow, you risk missing the market window.
You can have the biggest compute farm in the world, but it probably won’t save you. The critical, long-running tests are the long poles in the tent and will forever dominate your verification iteration time.
Simulation tests that run for many hours, or even days, might kill your productivity.
When you are in this situation you should take a serious look into simulation acceleration using the Cadence Palladium XP hardware accelerator. The Palladium accelerator can address not only the long pole problem, but in addition, it opens up opportunities for you to write longer and more complex tests that would be unrealistic on a simulator.
Many engineers are afraid of using hardware acceleration because it can be intimidating. However, Cadence has developed collateral that will help you to get started and productive quickly. In particular, we show you how a few tweaks to your UVM environment can accommodate both high-speed simulation, as well as acceleration, all from the same verification environment!
To help you understand UVM-based acceleration, we have published a set of introductory videos that will explain the basic concepts and walk you through an example that you can also access as a rapid adoption kit from Cadence online support. Don't miss these videos here: (Please visit the site to view this video)
Bruce Dickison, might have a need for “more cowbell!", but we all have a need for speed!
Axel Scherer