Looking to learn more about the best practices for emulating today’s billion-gate-plus designs? Rest assured—we’ve got you covered.
Cadence has been partnered with Nvidia Mellanox for years, helping them build complete end-to-end solutions for everything from networking to data centers. Mellanox provides and handles every aspect of the process, and they’ve got a long track record of delivering breakthrough technology. Mellanox Interconnect provides the acceleration for 305/500 of the world’s top supercomputers as of June 2020, and Cadence has been with them every step of the way, since all the way back in the Palladium® XP days, in 2012. They’ve since upgraded to Z1, and they’ve been very successful with it—Palladium helps them run their software successfully on their silicon as early as day one.
Mellanox used Palladium to bring all the components of their solutions together; letting them start software development far earlier than normal—while hardware development is still happening. Palladium is highly flexible and scalable, and as designs get bigger and more complex, this kind of design-process parallelism is only going to get more important.
Old design methodologies are just not sufficient to keep up with the pace of today’s evolving technology—so here’s a few emulation tips to help bring you up to speed.
- Emulation can generate a lot of data—make sure you’re prepared to handle and analyze it. Palladium can help with this, but it does require extra compute power. Remember that data can be static, dynamic, or both, and that data can be shared with other Cadence tools.
- A good rule of thumb is to have 1GB of host memory for every 1 MG.
- Don’t forget to use multi-threading or multi-core features!
- Make sure you communicate effectively to parallelize active and passive tasks. Emulator time is valuable and using it as efficiently as you can is key to efficient emulation. When nobody’s using the hardware, non-interactive workloads can be queued. The different communication channels are there for a reason—take advantage of the organization they provide.
Emulation is only becoming more and more important as technology progresses. Don’t let bad emulator habits or ignorance of features hold your team back!
For more information about Palladium, check here.