Cadence's Accelerator/Emulator Helps Nethra Reduce Development Time of HD Image Processor

Cadence Designs Systems has stated that its Incisive Palladium Accelerator/Emulator has helped Nethra Imaging to reduce the development time of an advanced high definition Image processor.

 

Cadence enables global electronic design innovation and deals in the creation of integrated circuits and electronics. Nethra Imaging is a fabless semiconductor company focused on delivering imaging and video solutions for a wide range of applications in the broadcast, medical, surveillance and military markets.

 

By adopting and quickly deploying Palladium II system for the HD image processor ASIC containing more than 25 million gates, Nethra was able to fasten the system-level verification for a leading-edge camera application.

 

According to Nethra, system-level and subsystem verification was able to achieve 507 KHz to 1.3MHz, depending on runtime environments and conditions. With simulation only, verification ran at about 30Hz; accelerated with the Palladium system, Nethra achieved an increase in acceleration for orders higher in magnitude at the full chip level.

 

Cadence has stated that its Incisive Palladium series delivers high system throughput, verification automation, and advanced debug to perform plan- and metric-driven system-level hardware/software co-verification. Capable of handling chip designs of up to 256 million gates, it also enables software to be developed and verified on a real hardware implementation using live data.

 

Palladium II system’s realistic in-circuit verification environment can offer a fast bring-up time to find bugs earlier in the product design cycle, and deliver a different class of system interoperability and coverage when compared with traditional simulation environments.

 

Nethra has admitted that the overall productivity they had achieved from Palladium II has increased their ability to validate their next-generation HD image processor. Previously they had to wait seven days to process just two HD frames but Palladium II technology enabled them to process over 120 frames in an hour.

 

In addition, the Palladium system's productivity features, such as runtime checkers, enabled Nethra to pinpoint design issues quickly. Nethra uncovered several artifacts that would have been harder to find without running hundreds of HD frames with system-level stimulus, namely SPI, DDR3, SATA and 10G Ethernet.

 

Cadence has stated that its system verification solutions and technologies continue to provide dependability to successful companies such as Nethra and the Palladium system again demonstrated its value through verification acceleration that helped increase productivity, quality and overall confidence.

 

Toshiba (News - Alert) Information Systems had selected Cadence and Nethra had adopted PDTi's SaaS (News - Alert) tool to design multi-core SoC.