Dr. Minh-Duc Doan, research scientist at Infineon Technologies, Business Group Communication, Rapid Prototyping in Munich comments the successful implementation of the Venus-X system: “As software has become a dominating part in many wireline communication systems, an early start of developing software packages for SoC's is a must. Therefore, we were looking for a flexible hardware platform with performance significantly higher than classical emulators. The Venus-X prototyping system has enabled us to develop and debug system software before silicon is available. By using a hundred-percent cycle-true hardware prototype, we can perform hardware / software integration in a very early development phase. This approach ensures time-to-market and can save costly silicon re-spins.”

With the further increasing complexity of VHDL and Verilog designs, and as a result, the rapid growth of the test and verification phase, tools like Venus-X achieve essential importance. AMO’s platform includes an extended bundle of different components. Its extreme scalability makes it perfectly suitable to rapid prototyping in all fields of activity. It does not only enable the start of verification at a very early state, as soon as RTL is available, but also accelerates the whole process. High speed software debugging prior to chip release enables the development of sophisticated software simultaneously to „first silicon“.