imPROVE-TLL Abstracts AMD Full-Custom Macro Designs
Los Gatos, CA, July 13, 2004 - TransEDA, a leader in coverage and ready-to-use verification solutions for electronic designs, today announced that AMD has deployed the company's imPROVE-TLL functional abstraction tool to abstract full-custom macro designs, enabling the use of equivalence checking to speed the verification process.
AMD's Macro Functional Verification team in Sunnyvale, CA deployed TransEDA's imPROVE-TLL to abstract full-custom macro designs, enabling the use of equivalence checking to speed up the verification process. AMD's Macro Functional Verification team specializes in the verification of the most complex full-custom macro designs, where full-custom design of IP blocks is often the best way to achieve optimal performance for a given functionality. Mostly used in Systems-on-a-chip (SOC) to be produced at a very high volume, full-custom design is extended for AMD microprocessors to the entire chip, in order to attain best-in-class performance for every new generation central processing unit (CPU). However, due to the large amount of information inherited from working at a low level of abstraction, the design and verification processes are very complex and extremely time consuming.
imPROVE-TLL moves a transistor design to a higher level of abstraction, enabling easier process retargeting and faster functional verification, thus saving significant verification time.
"With imPROVE-TLL we were able to create high-level abstracted models of our AMD Athlon™ 64 and AMD Opteron™ processor full-custom macro designs," says Borhan Roohipour, senior member of technical staff, Macro Functional Verification for AMD's California Microprocessor Division. "Thanks to imPROVE-TLL's accurate latch, flip-flop and ram recognition engine, we have been able to functionally compare the HDL models for the abstracted full-custom designs against our reference models using an equivalence checker. imPROVE-TLL generates high-quality HDL code that also enables significant speed up of dynamic verification. In addition, the tool's advanced hierarchical manipulation capability and user-friendly GUI makes it very flexible to insert in our flow."
Unlike traditional functional abstraction tools, imPROVE-TLL encompasses multiple abstraction algorithms and advanced black boxing and hierarchy manipulation features, capable of extracting the logic behavior of complex full-custom designs. The tool automatically performs an in-depth analysis of a transistor netlist, accurately extracting its logic behavior to generate the associated high-level HDL description. The abstracted model can then be used to access more effective functional verification techniques such as equivalence checking, logic simulation or even hardware emulation.
"We are very proud of AMD's decision to deploy imPROVE-TLL," comments Jean-Luc Bouvresse, CEO of TransEDA. "This great achievement opens the door to AMD verification flow standardization on our imPROVE-TLL functional abstraction tool."
AMD selected imPROVE-TLL for the following reasons:
- imPROVE-TLL is ready-to-use; it can be deployed as soon as you have a transistor netlist.
- Support for abstraction domain control, hierarchical processing and hierarchy manipulation in the generated model.
- Automatic translation of constraints into behavioral assertion statements.
- Support for multiple voltage levels.
- Black boxing of Strongly Connected Components (SCC) given a single element belonging to all regions connected through a single channel.
- Support for equivalence checking through accurate latch, flip-flop, and ram recognition engine.
- Powerful and user-friendly GUI.
About imPROVE-TLL
imPROVE-TLL is a transistor-level functional abstraction tool that automatically extracts the logic behavior from complex transistor netlists. imPROVE-TLL enables orders of faster functional verification of transistor netlists by using extracted models with equivalence checkers or logic simulators. The tool improves the understanding of full-custom IPs functionality resulting in easier debugging, and helps the productization of full-custom blocks by providing a HDL model as a functional behavior reference.
imPROVE-TLL can be used throughout the entire design process, facilitating easier, faster and more accurate incremental debug and regression testing of full-custom designs. imPROVE-TLL is scalable and applies to a wide range of IPs, from library cells to complex IP models such as full processors, RAM modules, etc.
imPROVE-TLL is available for immediate shipment and is supported on SUN Solaris 7, 8 and 9 and Red Hat Linux 7.2 and above.
About TransEDA
TransEDA is a leader in coverage and ready-to-use verification solutions for electronic designs. The company has over ten years of operating experience in the EDA market. In October 2003, TransEDA joined forced with TNI-Valiosys, a formal verification and validation solutions supplier, to provide customers with a predictable, structured verification environment.
TransEDA delivers advanced solutions for Coverage Analysis on simulation and emulation platforms with Coverability Analysis capability, Specification Coverage and Impact Analysis, Configurable HDL Checking, Static and Dynamic Property Checking, Automatic Bus Protocol Coverage, PCI Express Verification, Application Specific 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, and local representatives in China, Korea and Taiwan. For more information, please visit www.transeda.com.
For more information, please contact:
Marsha van den Heuvel - TransEDA Technology Ltd
Phone : + 33 (0)2 31 53 30 03
Email: marsha@transeda.com
TransEDA, the TransEDA logo, Verification from Concept to Reality and imPROVE-TLL are registered trademarks of TransEDA Technology Inc. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, AMD Opteron and AMD Athlon and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.
