Moore’s law continues to drive both chip complexity and performance to new highs every
year, and continues to stress and periodically “break” existing design flows, such as
functional verification, traditionally the largest bottleneck in the design process.

Testing new devices like 3G cell phones, internet routers, image processors, etc. with
complexity of hundreds of million transistors requires massive verification sequences that
would take many CPUyears to simulate on even the fastest PC. Increasingly, embedded
software is overtaking the hardware content of SoC devices pushing processing needs to
trillions of clock cycles. To harness the escalating problem, hardware-assisted
verification tools such as emulators and FPGA prototypes have been used for several years,
but each suffers its own set of drawbacks. Best-in-class emulation systems offer the large
capacity required to emulate complex systems, good hardware debugging features and fairly
ease setup. However they are very expensive assets, while their performance is just
mediocre – often 500kHz or less. FPGA-based rapid prototyping systems can reach into tens
of MHz and are much less costly than emulators. However, they typically accommodate small
to medium designs of few million gates, require long setup times, and are not well suited
to hardware debugging tasks.

EVE has pioneered an entirely new approach to hardware-assisted verification that
combines the unique aspects of best-in-class emulators and rapid prototyping systems into
a single, unified environment for both ASIC/SoC debugging and embedded software
validation.

With the high capacity, easy setup and debugging associated with emulation, and the
price/performance of rapid prototyping, ZeBu (for Zero-Bugs) is ideal for block-level
verification and for the system-integration phase of the design cycle where multiple logic
blocks and embedded software all must be verified together. Hardware design and software
development teams can share the same system and design representation, and can easily
collaborate when debugging complex hardware/software interactions.

The net effect is that hardware/software integration takes place much earlier in the
design cycle, thereby reducing silicon respins and accelerating time to market.

ZeBu is offered in two versions: a PCI-card (configurable to handle designs from 750k
to 6M ASIC logic gates) or a stand-alone box (configurable to handle designs from 10M to
100M ASIC logic gates). The PCI-card can reach a maximum execution speed of 200MHz in the
smaller configurations.

The stand-alone box can execute at a maximum speed of 20MHz. Both versions connect to a
desktop PC and integrate with the most popular
logic simulators or with C/C++/SystemC/ SystemVerilog models. An optimized
transaction-based interface sets an unprecedented execution speed of many megahertz. An
in-circuit emulation interface connects ZeBu to a target system and/or to hard IP
cores.

ZeBu Key Features for Hardware Verification

• Rapid setup with the ZeBu Compiler:
• Completely automated compiler
• Memory generation & pre-defined memory models
• Incremental compilation
• Fast, parallel compilation on multiple PCs
• Comprehensive hardware debugging environment, including:
• Run-time read/write access of all registers & memories
• Complete internal state capture without re-compilation
• I/O pin & static probe tracing
• H/W Triggers & built-in logic analyzer
• VCD & FSDB generation & Waveform API
• Integration with Debussy™/Verdi™ debug environment
• Support for synthesizable SystemVerilog Assertions
• HDL Simulators (Co-emulation):
  
  - VCS™, NC-Sim™, ModelSim™

ZeBu Key Features for Hardware /Software Integration and Embedded Software
Validation

• High speed operation for fast execution of large software programs
• Interfaces to popular software debuggers such as ARM, ARC, Tensilica, TI and others.
  Interface to ARM Logic Tile.
• Save/restore function helps bypass lengthy boot sequences when recreating problems
• Same design representation for HW verification and SW validation for quickest resolution
  of HW/SW integration issues
• Available in reduced-cost “replicate” configuration for embedded software development.
  Leveraging a wide range of exceptionally fast operating modes and priced very
  competitively, ZeBu sets a new benchmark for the most cycles per dollar of any solution on
  the market.

Call EVE-TEAM today for a FREE consultation or FREE whitepaper.