Emulation Solutions for PCI Express Gen3 Product Verification

The iSolveT PCI Express Gen3, which has a 'plug-and-play' hardware interface to the Veloce family of hardware emulators, provides a cost-effective and efficient solution to verify PCI Express Gen3 devices on a SoC design. The Gen3 product is also fully compatible with older Gen1 and Gen2 speed devices. This new solution adds to the existing iSolve family of products for the accelerated verification of applications such as multimedia, networking, embedded systems, wireless, and storage devices.

Complementing the iSolve product is a new Veloce PCI Express Gen3 Transactor, which delivers an accelerated simulation environment for the verification of PCI Express Gen3-compliant devices. It generates the appropriate stimuli for the Design-Under-Test, passing packets, or transactions, of protocol data for tests. The transactor also provides a high-level Application Programming Interface to allow use with multiple test-bench environments, such as SystemVerilog/UVM and SystemC, and provides example test environments that can exercise the emulated PCI Express Gen3 device.

Increased bandwidth and performance requirements of modern PCs and servers, especially those involving high-speed graphics, have made PCI Express an industry standard. As a result, PCI Express motherboards and associated peripherals, such as multi-gigabit Ethernet cards and RAID controllers, have become widespread and popular. With such a prevalence of new products for PCI Express applications, the need for a solution that allows the verification of these products and applications has become more critical and is in high demand. The latest generation of PCI Express, Gen3, increases this need further.

The growth in PCI Express products has been increasing rapidly, and is especially important to those in the server, gaming and entertainment sectors where increased data throughput and high-speed graphics are mandatory for the operation of applications, said Eric Selosse, vice president and general manager, Mentor Emulation Division. The challenges faced by the creators of such systems are complex, and require high-performance verification solutions to detect flaws early in the development cycle and to reduce risks. To solve these challenges, we created both hardware and software solutions for the verification of PCI Express Gen3 products. These solutions provide more flexibility and ease-of-use, and the configurable test models that our customers require for pre-and post-silicon testing.

The new PCI Express Gen3 products deliver use modes with traditional in-circuit emulation or high-performance transaction-based acceleration. Combined with Veloce2, the latest-generation emulator from MentorR, these PCI Express solutions deliver high-performance, and an easy-to-use system verification environment to develop new SoCs containing PCI Express Gen3 devices, without compromising delivery schedules.

Both solutions are available for deployment at customer sites effective immediately.

The Veloce2 emulator is a high-performance dual-mode accelerator/emulator, delivering twice the performance and capacity of previous generations for both transaction-based verification and traditional in-circuit emulation. With an extensive portfolio of vertical market solutions, the Veloce2 emulator is the platform of choice for networking, wireless, multimedia, storage, and embedded systems applications.