SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — Offering a board-level verification product that promises enough speed for simultaneous hardware and embedded software debugging, Emulation and Verification Engineering (EVE) this week will announce its ZeBu-UF series, along with the first member of the new family.

EVE (Palaiseau, France) provides low-cost hardware-assisted verification products. To date, the company has provided the board-level ZeBu Personal Emulator and a standalone box, the ZeBu System Emulator.

The new ZeBu-UF family replaces the Personal Emulator, and, like that product, it's a PCI card system that ships with partitioning and debugging software. But the ZeBu-UF offers a considerable advancement, according to Lauro Rizzatti, general manager of EVE-USA (San Jose, Calif.).

The Personal Emulator, Rizzatti said, "is very rigid in the sense that it's all wired and cannot be expanded to increase design capacity."

The Personal Emulator uses two Xilinx Virtex-II FPGAs and has a capacity of 1.5 million ASIC gates. The ZeBu-UF family, in contrast, uses Virtex-4 FPGAs and will have a maximum capacity of 6 million gates. The initial ZeBu-UF2 offering, however, has two FPGAs, and it supports as many as 3 million gates.

Rizzatti explained that the ZeBu-UF uses a mother and daughter card and that the daughter card can be swapped out later for one with greater capacity. He said EVE expects to release a daughter card with four Virtex-4 FPGAs, supporting up to 6 million gates, early next year.

Further, while the Personal Emulator supports only in-circuit emulation up to 12 MHz, the ZeBu-UF2 can run as fast as 60 MHz. That's fast enough to support software debugging in the target system, Rizzatti said. Future ZeBu-UF products will run as fast as 200 MHz, he said.

Rizzatti noted that the daughter card has 30 layers and is a "very complex PCB." The initial ZeBu-UF2 product supports 160 Mbytes of on-board memory, with future family members reaching 512 Mbytes.

The ZeBu-UF2 comes with the same software that has accompanied other EVE emulation products. It includes an automated compiler that performs clustering, memory generation, bus resolution, clock processing and multiple-data-rate wrapper generation.

While 3 million gates may not seem like a large capacity, Rizzatti said, there are "many, many" ASIC designs in the range of 2 million to 3 million gates. The ZeBu-UF2 is available now starting at $25,000.