OneSpin 360 EC-FPGA Used to Verify Microsemi FPGA Designs, Including SmartFusion2 SoC FPGAs and IGLOO2 FPGAs, for Safety Critical Applications
Microsemi Corporation (Nasdaq: MSCC), a leading provider of semiconductor solutions differentiated by power, security, reliability and performance, and OneSpin Solutions™ today announced that OneSpin® 360 Equivalence Checking (EC)-FPGA verification solution now fully supports Microsemi’s Libero® System-on-Chip (SoC) design flow.
Equivalency checking has become a critical component in the verification of high-reliability designs such as safety critical components, ensuring that no issues are introduced during the design refinement process. OneSpin’s EC-FPGA product augments Microsemi’s Libero design flow to ensure the functional consistency of high-reliability designs throughout design refinement, significantly reducing the risk of an end-product fault.
“OneSpin Solutions has created innovative formal-based design verification and equivalence checking solutions that are being used to fully vet some of the most safety critical designs in production today,” said Bruce Weyer, vice president and business unit manager at Microsemi. “We believe that by including equivalence checking as part of the design flow, we will better meet our customers’ stringent requirements for high-reliability designs.”
Microsemi has seen tremendous adoption of its Libero SoC design software for its SmartFusion2 and IGLOO2 FPGAs in 2013, and now has over 44,000 licenses granted year to date. This is being driven by the inherent value the market is seeing with Microsemi FPGAs, which are positioned competitively in mainstream applications for communication, industrial, aerospace and defense markets.
Erik Matusek, the Safety System Platform Manager at Westinghouse Electric Company, LLC said, “The Microsemi ProASIC3 FPGA is a core component of the Advanced Logic System, and use of the OneSpin 360 Equivalence Checker is an integral part of our FPGA development process for nuclear safety systems.”
By leveraging OneSpin’s equivalence checker with Microsemi’s industry-leading design flow, designers can be certain that when they implement the most aggressive design flow optimizations to improve FPGA device power consumption, performance and area utilization, they do not introduce functional errors. The tool verifies functional equivalence between the register transfer level (RTL) code and the netlist prior to FPGA download, thus reducing prototype verification requirements and ensuring that no design flow bugs appear in the final device.
“High reliability is a critical consideration for designers employing Microsemi devices and the reason why equivalence checking is an important technology in this flow,” said Dr. Raik Brinkmann, OneSpin Solutions’ president and chief executive officer. “Given our own expertise in this area, we are delighted to cooperate with Microsemi on a flow that targets the sharp-end of verification needs, high reliability.”
About the OneSpin 360 EC-FPGA Verification Solution
OneSpin 360 EC-FPGA eliminates design flow-generated errors in FPGAs, uniquely supporting complex sequential optimizations with an easy-to-use solution that accelerates schedules, reduces risk and increases product quality. The tool includes support for Verilog, SystemVerilog, VHDL, EDIF and mixed languages, and runs on the Linux and Solaris platforms. It also supports Microsemi’s SmartFusion2 SoC FPGAs, IGLOO2 and IGLOO FPGAs, ProASIC3 and Fusion FPGA devices.
About Microsemi SmartFusion2 SoC FPGAs
Microsemi’s SmartFusion2 SoC FPGAs are the only devices that address fundamental requirements for advanced security, high reliability and low power in critical industrial, military, aviation, communications and medical applications. SmartFusion2 integrates an inherently reliable flash-based FPGA fabric, a 166 megahertz (MHz) ARM® CortexTM-M3 processor, advanced security processing accelerators, DSP blocks, SRAM, eNVM and industry-required high-performance communication interfaces all on a single chip. For more information visit http://www.microsemi.com/products/fpga-soc/soc-fpga/smartfusion2.
About Microsemi IGLOO2 FPGAs
Microsemi’s IGLOO2 FPGAs continue the company’s focus on addressing the needs of today’s cost-optimized FPGA market by providing a LUT-based fabric, 5G transceiver, high speed GPIO, block RAM, high-performance memory subsystem, and DSP blocks in a differentiated, cost and power optimized architecture. This next generation IGLOO2 architecture offers up to five times more logic density and three times more fabric performance than its predecessors and combines a non-volatile Flash-based fabric with the highest number of general purpose I/O, 5G SERDES interfaces and PCIe end points when compared to other products in its class. IGLOO2 FPGAs offer best-in-class feature integration coupled with the lowest power, highest reliability and most advanced security in the industry.
For more information visit: http://www.microsemi.com/products/fpga-soc/fpga/igloo2-fpga.
Pricing and Availability
The combined design flow is available immediately. Pricing is available upon request. Please contact sales.support@microsemi.com.
About OneSpin Solutions
Electronic design automation (EDA) supplier OneSpin Solutions award-winning formal verification technology is based on more than 300 engineering years of development and application service experience. OneSpin’s comprehensive product line simplifies designer verification, increases intensive block verification coverage, eliminates design refinement problems, and provides automated solutions for many complex verification problems. Leading telecommunications, automotive, consumer electronics and embedded systems companies rely on OneSpin to achieve the highest possible verification quality while reducing their time-to-market pressures. Its United States headquarters is located in San Jose, Calif. Corporate headquarters is in Munich, Germany. Email: info@onespin-solutions.com. Website: www.onespin-solutions.com.
About Microsemi
Microsemi Corporation (Nasdaq: MSCC) offers a comprehensive portfolio of semiconductor and system solutions for communications, defense & security, aerospace and industrial markets. Products include high-performance and radiation-hardened analog mixed-signal integrated circuits, FPGAs, SoCs and ASICs; power management products; timing and synchronization devices and precise time solutions, setting the world’s standard for time; voice processing devices; RF solutions; discrete components; security technologies and scalable anti-tamper products; Power-over-Ethernet ICs and midspans; as well as custom design capabilities and services. Microsemi is headquartered in Aliso Viejo, Calif., and has approximately 3,400 employees globally. Learn more at www.microsemi.com.
Microsemi and the Microsemi logo are registered trademarks or service marks of Microsemi Corporation and/or its affiliates. OneSpin, OneSpin Solutions, OneSpin 360, OneSpin 360 DV-Verify, the OneSpin logo and Quantify are trademarks of OneSpin Solutions GmbH. Third-party trademarks and service marks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.
“Safe Harbor” Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: Any statements set forth in this news release that are not entirely historical and factual in nature, including without limitation statements related to OneSpin® 360 Equivalence Checking (EC)-FPGA verification solution now fully supporting Microsemi’s Libero® System-on-Chip (SoC) design flow, and its potential effects on future business, are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on our current expectations and are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements. The potential risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, such factors as rapidly changing technology and product obsolescence, potential cost increases, variations in customer order preferences, weakness or competitive pricing environment of the marketplace, uncertain demand for and acceptance of the company’s products, adverse circumstances in any of our end markets, results of in-process or planned development or marketing and promotional campaigns, difficulties foreseeing future demand, potential non-realization of expected orders or non-realization of backlog, product returns, product liability, and other potential unexpected business and economic conditions or adverse changes in current or expected industry conditions, difficulties and costs of protecting patents and other proprietary rights, inventory obsolescence and difficulties regarding customer qualification of products. In addition to these factors and any other factors mentioned elsewhere in this news release, the reader should refer as well to the factors, uncertainties or risks identified in the company’s most recent Form 10-K and all subsequent Form 10-Q reports filed by Microsemi with the SEC. Additional risk factors may be identified from time to time in Microsemi’s future filings. The forward-looking statements included in this release speak only as of the date hereof, and Microsemi does not undertake any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances.