USB 2.0 Tester From Mentor Graphics

Mentor Graphics Corp., in high-performance system verification solutions, announced a hardware-assisted solution to accelerate the verification of Universal Serial Bus (USB) 2.0 products, including hard disk drives and other mass storage devices. This new solution enables designers to test the System-on-Chip (SoC) design that controls a hard disk drive or similar mass storage device, by providing an accurate, hardware-based model of the real disk drive connected to their SoC.

This iSolve USB Peripheral product has a ‘plug-and-play’ interface to the Veloce family of hardware-assisted emulators, providing a cost-effective and efficient solution to verify USB designs. The new product adds to the existing iSolve family of solutions for the accelerated verification of applications such as multimedia, networking, embedded systems, wireless, and storage devices.

USB is a pervasive technology across a wide range of products, with billions of devices having been created that use the protocol. With the ever-increasing demand for system-level verification of such products, a heavy burden is placed on SoC designers who need to verify how their designs interact with the USB devices connected to them.

“New consumer products, in particular, are increasingly dependent on the use of the latest-generation USB devices, and design engineers are concerned with the quick and efficient verification of their SoC designs that will connect to these devices,” said Jim Kenney, director of marketing, Mentor’s Emulation Division. “We took a new approach to solve these challenges with our iSolve USB Peripheral product, by providing a flexible, easy-to-use, and highly-configurable USB peripheral device model. This gives our customers the ability to verify multiple configurations and descriptions of USB peripheral devices—all with the same emulator solution—rather than needing many specific devices.”

Combined with the Veloce emulation family, the iSolve USB Peripheral product delivers a high-performance and easy-to-use system verification environment to develop new SoCs containing a USB host controller, without compromising delivery schedules.

The solution offers several key benefits:

• Easy-to-use configuration tool means users are able to parameterize their USB mass storage device quickly and start their SoC verification as soon as possible
• Productive debug environment provides access to low-level transactions to detect those hard-to-find bugs
• High-speed data accesses allows loading or unloading of GBytes of data in minutes rather than hours.
• Compliant to USB 2.0 standard

The iSolve USB Peripheral solution can be used with traditional in-circuit emulation (ICE) as well as a high-performance, transaction-based acceleration mode of operation. The ability to mix and match traditional ICE capabilities with high-performance transaction-based acceleration facilitates the smooth transition from a simulation-centric use model to in-circuit emulation. The solution is available for deployment at customer sites effective immediately.