ZeBu emulator adds fast synthesis capabilities

Venice, Florida — EVE announced that it will offer synthesis capabilities known as zFAST (ZeBu FAst SynThesis) to handle large designs with a bottom-up and top-down approach targeting its ZeBu (for Zero Bugs) emulation systems. "Only an FPGA-based emulator can save the day when it comes to full system validation," remarks Lauro Rizzatti, EVE-USA's general manager and vice president of marketing. "New designs reach tens of millions of ASIC-equivalent gates, with processor and graphics designs moving well into several hundreds of millions gates. Mapping such large designs into a large array of FPGAs break many commercial FPGA synthesis tools. zFAST was developed for these types of designs." The just released zFAST is tightly integrated with zCUI, the ZeBu Compilation User Interface. The use model for zFAST is the same as the use model for commercial FPGA synthesis tools.

In its press release EVE claims that zFAST Supports all three major design languages - VHDL, Verilog and SystemVerilog -, and that it typically runs over one order of magnitude faster than best-in-class field programmable gate array (FPGA) synthesis. It can map large designs with a small increase in area compared to equivalent tools. zFAST can be parallelized on several PCs, further accelerating the synthesis process.

In order to help designers follow the implementation flow, zFAST keeps register transfer level (RTL) signals so that ZeBu can generate VCD/FSDB/VPD waveform files with RTL signal names. zFAST supports bottom-up - or module-by-module - synthesis, as well as top-down synthesis. Further, it includes ZW-FPGA synthesizable library for FPGA components, namely RTL models for the most common Synopsys' DesignWare Library components.

The ZeBu compiler will continue to support commercial FPGA synthesis tools for small- and medium-size designs requiring high-speed runtime performance or compatibility with an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) prototyping flow.

The new product is available as an add-on feature for ZeBu. It is priced from $50,000 for the first license, and from $15,000 for additional licenses. Further information can be found on the company's web site.