Expanding emulation’s reach with virtual devices
Unlocking the door to emulation
The key is to virtualize all of this hardware. Virtual devices offer the same functionality as traditional In-Circuit (ICE) solutions, but without the need for additional cables and additional hardware units. Thus, they make emulation more readily available to all design teams within a company while increasing the flexibility, visibility, and capacity of emulation environments.
Virtualized solutions add a range of capabilities that promise to redraw the functional verification landscape. These include virtual host and peripheral models (called “virtual devices”) and software debug technologies enabled by transaction-based, co-model channel technology.
In this scenario, hardware accurate models of the peripherals run on a standard workstation, such as Linux, so that the SoC and software device drivers running in the emulator can interact with these hardware accurate models, just like with ICE, except that they are all implemented virtually. Because the virtual lab (Figure 2, below) is entirely in software, a single emulator can support many users. The complete emulation environment can be instantly replicated and reconfigured.
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The virtual lab setup enables emulators to be shared around the world and around the clock. The emulation environment is now data center compatible, as opposed to being confined to the role of a lab bench dedicated to a single project. Because of the ease of replication and configuration, engineers from anywhere in the world can take turns using the same emulator.
Each user needs only a single workstation connected to an emulator to verify their entire SoC environment. These workstations are highly reliable, low cost, and very compact. Instead of a mass of cables, speed adaptors, and a lab bench full of boards and stuff, there is only the emulator and a small rack of unit-high workstations.
With the emulation environment now housed in a data center format, it has to be reconfigurable by software, because users will not have physical access to it. With the virtual lab, teams around the world can reconfigure it via software. It is officially shared by multiple projects and geographies, and it can be reconfigured for another project with a different set of peripherals instantaneously—in the same amount of time it takes it to load a new design into the emulator.
Accurate and Fast
Virtual models are hardware accurate because they are based on licensed design IP; therefore they are just as accurate as ICE peripherals. Virtual models use the actual, synthesizable RTL that SoC designers license and put into their chips. Because it is synthesizable RTL, the peripheral model can be compiled into the emulator, and the DUT can talk to a full, accurate, RTL hardware representation of the peripheral, such as a USB 3.0 controller that is in the emulator (Figure 3, below).
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Continuing with USB 3.0 as an example, on the workstation side, there is a USB software stack and software that targets it for a mass storage function client or USB memory stick. The result is a functionally accurate USB memory stick—all done virtually between the RTL synthesized into the emulator linked over a co-model channel to the software stack and function client running on the workstation. This is why users do not lose any accuracy by going to the virtual approach.
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