Cadence CADENCE PALLADIUM XP - TECH BRIEF Manual - page 8
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PALLADIUM XP VERIFICATION COMPUTING PLATFORM
Palladium XP
Verification
Computing
Platform
USB
Device
Fibre
Channel
Multi-
Ethernet
USB
Host
PCI Express
Video/
Audio
PCI/PCI-X
SAS
Multi-I/O
Wireless
SATA
Interface
to Third-
Party IP and
Testers
Figure 8: For most industry-standard protocols, off-the-shelf VIP such as SpeedBridge
Adapters are available, enabling SoC designs running on Palladium XP to interface with
real-world devices/targets/testers for system-level verification
TRANSACTION-BASED ACCELERATION
Transaction-based acceleration (TBA) is an optimized simulation acceleration mode that supports a trans-
action-oriented testbench modeling style. It accelerates logic simulation by several orders of magnitude.
TBA uses message-level communication between the testbench components running on a workstation
and the rest of the environment running on the Palladium XP platform. By using message-level communi-
cation rather than signal-level communication, TBA reduces the amount of communication overhead
between the workstation and the emulator, thereby increasing overall acceleration performance.
•Congruent TBA allows users to create a transaction-based environment without using the hardware.
Using only a simulator, such as Incisive Enterprise Simulator, engineers can fully develop their models
and optimize environment bring-up time. Once the models are fully functional, engineers can then
migrate painlessly to hardware, where these same models will run unchanged yet faster than with
standard simulation. With congruent TBA, results are guaranteed to be the same, regardless of which
engine (Incisive or Palladium XP) is employed.
•Concurrent TBA allows users to achieve near-emulation performance with designs being driven from
a testbench. In this mode, the design runs continuously (free running) at full emulation speed while the
testbench is running on the workstation. This unique feature is ideal for running large regression suites,
where maximum performance is essential.
Palladium XP employs an Accellera standardized interface—SCE-MI—and SystemVerilog DPI to simulators
with support for standard and advanced testbench languages, including SystemVerilog, SystemC,
and C/C++.