Thierry Bauchon, R&D Director, Home Entertainment Group, STMicroelectronics

Chip verification has continued to get harder, despite attempts to improve it. And, simulation, the core-enabling tool of design verification, has been a fundamental bottleneck. It has never delivered the performance necessary to verify the biggest and most complex designs.

With their MHz-plus speeds, FPGA and emulation platforms provide tremendous promise. Unfortunately, they have been expensive and too hard to work with. They have been made to work in the high-end, but only through heroic efforts, and have therefore been primarily used for processor and graphics chips where the market size justifies the millions of dollars and the team of engineers emulation requires.

Would You Use Emulation or FPGA Prototyping If It Were Less Costly and Easier to Use?

Bluespec puts FPGA and emulation platforms within reach for mainstream development. Bluespec makes these platforms much easier to work with, ensures that work is portable across different platforms, and delivers better performance by enabling more flexible hardware, software partitioning.

Key Solutions

Synthesizable Testbenches, Transactors and Models

• Bluespec has a general-purpose high-level synthesis language, toolset and IP libraries that enable powerful parameterization, reusability, and composability of testbench components, transactors and DUT. In order to achieve acceptable performance, link and simulation bottlenecks must be overcome. This inevitably means moving testbench components into the emulation platform – which can only be done quickly and effectively with general purpose, high-level design and synthesis.

• Bluespec provides Transaction Level Modeling (TLM) seamlessly for both modeling and implementation. General purpose high-level synthesis, with the industry’s highest abstraction for control logic, Bluespec simplifies and accelerates transactor implementation.

Desktop Emulation Platform for CODECs. A complete, low-cost desktop solution for verifying stream-based DUTs of any type, such as CODECs. Using off-the-shelf FPGA cards, you can leverage C/C++/SystemC-based testbenches running on your PC/workstation against your DUT running in real hardware. Bluespec provides all the software and hardware for working with your testbench, DUT and standard FPGA card.

SCE-MI Platform for HW/SW Co-Emulation. Bluespec has a well-engineered co-emulation stack that provides fast bringup and portability, and facilitates rapid testbench re-partitioning. It supports:

• The SCE-MI API

• Hardware abstraction of physical connections (e.g. USB, Ethernet, …) for deployment flexibility

• Seamless integration with Bluespec transactors and synthesizable testbenches on the emulation platform

Example Projects

• With Bluespec, a top 10 semiconductor company was able to bring a three month verification cycle down to three weeks with Bluespec’s synthesizable verification.

• Bluespec enabled a leading wireless manufacturer to use a standard, low-cost FPGA board and workstation together to co-verify a large IP block orders-of-magnitude faster than in simulation.