While attending the Globalpress Summit a couple of weeks ago, I heard Mentor Graphics announcement of the Veloce2 platform, the next-generation of emulation solutions for the verification of electronic system and Systems on Chip (SoC) designs. Built to accommodate up to two billion gate designs, the Veloce2 platform is expected to deliver twice the performance, twice the capacity and four times productivity gain in the same footprint and power consumption as the first-generation Veloce platform.

In addition, a new concept called Veloce VirtuaLAB gives verification engineers access to software-based peripherals, connected to the Veloce platform, which provide a “virtual lab” environment to verify complex electronics systems including the embedded software and the SoCs that make up the system prior to first silicon availability.

Veloce2 is built upon the totally new, full custom emulation IC, Crystal2, developed by Mentor. Delivering fast compile, full debug visibility, and advanced memory modeling, Crystal2 is at the heart of the Veloce2 platform’s performance and capacity gains. The Crystal-based Veloce architecture is highly scalable and delivers improved performance and capacity gains in the same physical footprint and power signature.

The Veloce2 software suite is backward compatible with first-generation Veloce emulators, boosting the productivity of current Veloce customers and preserving their investment while extending the useful life of their Veloce hardware. Future generations of Veloce will adhere to this common software philosophy.

The Veloce VirtuaLAB builds on the emulator’s ability to run hardware designs written in RTL at megahertz speeds. By integrating RTL models of key peripherals like USB, Ethernet, PCIe and the like, the Veloce VirtuaLAB is able to create a full target environment that allows developers to validate both the hardware and embedded software, before any hardware is manufactured.

Because the Veloce VirtuaLAB is entirely software-based, it is easily replicated to support multiple software and hardware developers simultaneously. Previously, system developers had to connect physical peripherals to the emulator via hardware speed adaptors, making the process cumbersome and expensive to support multiple users simultaneously. In effect, Veloce VirtuaLAB takes the emulator out of the lab environment and moves it into a data center environment where the resource can be shared across multiple projects and geographies. Veloce VirtuaLAB peripherals are available for most popular protocols, such as multimedia video/audio standards, Gigabit Ethernet, USB, PCI Express, SATA, and SAS with more to come.