Mentor Accelerate Verification of 6Gb SAS Products

Mentor Graphics Corp., provider of system verification solutions, announced hardware and software solutions to accelerate the verification of serial-attached SCSI, or SAS, second-generation, or Gen 2, products, having speeds up to 6Gbps.

Using the Mentor verification solutions, designers can test their SAS Gen2 devices integrated on their SoC designs, and develop and test their software drivers and applications prior to silicon being available.

The first new product is iSolve SAS, which has a plug-and-play hardware interface to the Veloce family of hardware emulators. It provides a solution to verify SAS Gen2 target devices with their software drivers in a SoC design. Additionally, an emulated SoC containing a SAS initiator device, such as HBA, can be connected via the iSolve SAS solution to a full-speed SAS disk drive for testing with real target hardware.

The Gen2 solution is also compatible with older Gen1 speed devices. This new hardware product adds to the existing iSolve family of solutions for the accelerated verification of applications such as storage, networking, embedded systems, wireless, and multimedia devices.

Complementing the iSolve solution is the SAS transaction-based verification IP (VIP) solution. This delivers both a simulation environment, using the Questa verification platform, and accelerated simulation environment using the Veloce hardware for the verification of SAS Gen2-compliant devices. It generates the stimuli for the Design-Under-Test (DUT), passing packets, or transactions, of protocol data for tests.

The VIP solution also provides an API)to allow use with multiple test-bench environments, such as SystemVerilog and SystemC, and provides example test environments that can exercise the emulated SAS Gen2 device. The Gen2 SAS VIP is also compatible with Gen1 speed devices.

The new SAS products deliver use modes with traditional in-circuit emulation (ICE) and high-performance, transaction-based simulation or acceleration. When combined with Questa and Veloce2, the new-generation emulator from Mentor, the SAS products deliver system verification for developing SoCs containing SAS Gen2 devices, without compromising delivery schedules.

The Veloce2 emulator is a dual-mode accelerator/emulator, delivering twice the performance and capacity of previous generations for both transaction-based verification and traditional in-circuit emulation (ICE).

"The growth in SAS products has been increasing rapidly, and is especially important to those in sectors where large data-intensive storage is mandatory for the operation of applications," said Eric Selosse, VP and GM, 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 SAS Gen2 products. These products provide flexibility and ease-of-use, including the configurable test models that our customers require for pre-and post-silicon testing."