Synopsys & Wavesat VCS Provides High Performance Needed for Verification of Complex Wireless Chipset FPGA and ASIC Designs

"When simulating VHDL and Verilog, we have found VCS® to be 2-3 times faster than any other simulator. The combination of this speed and Synopsys’ excellent support has made VCS the cornerstone of the verification environment for our advanced wireless chipset products."

Darcy Poncsak, Verification Lead at Wavesat

Wavesat is a leading supplier of wireless chipsets providing non-line-of-sight (NLOS) broadband wireless access (BWA). Wavesat was the first supplier in the BWA industry to introduce an IEEE 802.16-2004-compliant PHY (physical layer) chipset with forward compatibility to the 802.16e standard for mobile applications. Wavesat develops a wide range of distinctive and cost-effective BWA products, from highly efficient base stations to low-power mobile client premise equipment (CPE). The company must consistently deliver the highest-quality and most cost-effective broadband wireless products available on the market. These products must enable superior infrastructure and communication performances with ease of integration at lower cost than other solutions.

Issues

• Aggressive market pressures
• Complex BWA chips with high performance
• Requirement to deliver FPGA prototypes

Solutions

• VCS mixed-HDL simulator

Benefits

• Verification runtimes 2-5 times faster than other vendors
• Common verification flow for FPGA and ASIC implementations
• Prototypes delivered on time to critical customers

The highly-competitive nature of the BWA market puts a great deal of pressure on the Wavesat team to deliver products on time and on budget. At the same time, the high performance demands of the IEEE 802.16 standards dictate that successful products must be very complex.

These forces require that, despite their complexity, Wavesat chip designs must be verified both efficiently and thoroughly. Since Wavesat provides full-speed FPGA prototypes to its customers before a mixed-signal ASIC implementation is fabricated, this accelerates the verification schedule even further.

"When we embarked on the 802.16-2004 project, we knew that our simulation solution was not fast enough to run all the verification tests we needed within our schedule,” said Wavesat Verification Lead Darcy Poncsak. “We targeted improvement in this area, and that’s where Synopsys stepped in."

Wavesat embarked on a detailed evaluation of VHDL and Verilog simulators from all major vendors. "We design primarily in VHDL, but there are times when we need Verilog as well, so it was critical for us that our simulation solution be able to handle both languages well at both the RTL and netlist levels," said Poncsak.

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"Because of its compilation and simulation speed, Synopsys completely displaced two other existing simulation vendors."

Pierre Lamoureux, VP Engineering and CTO at Wavesat

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"Our evaluation found that VCS was 2-3 times faster than the next-fastest simulation product, and about 5 times faster than the slowest simulator we tried," said Wavesat VP Engineering and CTO Pierre Lamoureux. "VCS also compiled very quickly, so the decision was easy. Synopsys completely displaced two other existing simulation vendors for the 802.16-2004 design and follow-on projects."

The development team used shared simulation scripts and setup files for both the FPGA and ASIC designs, so that the same VCS-based verification flow fed into the two implementation flows. This ensured that the prototypes used by early customers would match the behavior of the production chips.

With the faster simulation speed of VCS, Wavesat was able to complete the 802.16-2004 design on schedule. The resulting product, the DM256, will be available to customers shortly. The DM256-EK, a board containing the full-speed FPGA implementation, is available now for customers to evaluate the design.

"We are very pleased that we selected VCS as the foundation for our verification environment," said Lamoureux. "This was actually our sixth-generation BWA chipset. Previous verification methods would not have kept pace with its increased size and complexity. With VCS, the project was a resounding success."

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For more information on how VCS and the Synopsys Discovery™ Verification Platform can help facilitate your business objectives, please contact your local Synopsys Sales representative.

Related links:
- Wavesat
- VCS
- VCS White Paper