July 19, 2010 -- Cadence Design Systems, Inc. today announced that Hitachi, Ltd. established a complex and high-quality functional-verification environment with a 10,000 times performance boost by using Cadence high-level synthesis and functional-verification technologies and methodologies. Hitachi engineers verified a complex subsystem, including a next-generation PCI express core, by deploying the Cadence C-to-Silicon Compiler to accelerate their testbench on the III acceleration/ emulation system. The Cadence technology enabled Hitachi to achieve a more exhaustive set of functional test cases.

"We had to deliver high-quality designs in a short time window and therefore urgently needed to develop a platform that performed at a minimum of 1,000 times faster to verify more complex and larger combinations of functional test cases," said Nobuo Tamba, Ph.D, General Manager of the Design & Development Operation, Micro Device Division at Hitachi. "Working with Cadence to apply new technologies created a breakthrough for our methodology."

First, Hitachi engineers employed SystemC and transaction-level modeling (TLM) to develop complex testbench functions such as auto-pattern generation and auto-response logic, and a scoreboard. Then they deployed Cadence high-level synthesis to generate the synthesizable testbench, accelerating overall verification on a Palladium III system with Cadence transaction-based acceleration.