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Cadence Design Systems > Case Studies > Newport Media's Enhanced Verification Process with Cadence Solutions

Newport Media's Enhanced Verification Process with Cadence Solutions

Technology Category

Automation & Control - Human Machine Interface (HMI)
Networks & Connectivity - RF Transceivers

Applicable Industries

Electrical Grids
Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Product Research & Development
Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Leasing Finance Automation
Time Sensitive Networking

Services

System Integration
Testing & Certification

The Challenge

Newport Media, a fabless semiconductor company, was faced with the challenge of delivering highly integrated receiver solutions with unprecedented performance, power consumption, size, and cost-efficiency. The company's development team was tasked with developing the verification environment for a new version of the design featuring an external bus interface. The block under verification featured 40K logic gates, including an AHB master/slave interface, an external microprocessor interface, and a direct memory access (DMA) engine. The team needed to expose hard-to-find bugs early in the design cycle of AHB master/slave to verify protocol compliance and write more extensive tests to uncover and explore corner cases.

About The Customer

Newport Media is a fabless semiconductor company based in Southern California. Founded in 2005, the company aims to deliver highly integrated receiver solutions for emerging digital audio and mobile TV applications. The company's development team focuses on developing broadcast multimedia architectures and integrated circuit (IC) implementations with unprecedented performance, power consumption, size, and cost-efficiency. Newport Media's premier product line, the Sundance Series, is a multi-standard platform developed to support a wide variety of emerging mobile television standards, including DVB-H, DMB, ISDB-T, and FLO. The single-chip radio-frequency (RF) tuner delivers an advanced user feature set and best-in-class RF noise figure and demodulator Doppler performance.

The Solution

To address these challenges, Newport Media opted to employ the Cadence Incisive Formal Verifier solution and Cadence Incisive Assertion-Based Verification IP (VIP). The team took advantage of the Cadence AHB Assertion-Based VIP offering, a plug-and-play verification environment that simplifies verification for the ARM AMBA AHB protocol. Incisive VIP provides static analysis and protocol compliance checking, which offered a significant shortcut for the team. Newport Media also employed Incisive Formal Verifier, which enabled engineers to begin module verification at the same time they’re being designed, reducing re-spins and lowering risk. The tool accurately pinpointed design bugs in about an hour, detecting functional bugs months before testbench development and simulation could begin.

Operational Impact

The use of Cadence's Incisive Formal Verifier and Incisive VIP resulted in improved productivity and quality of functional verification earlier in the design and verification process for Newport Media. The solutions provided instant and insightful feedback, making the verification process quicker and more efficient. The use of these tools also increased predictability and decreased risk in the design process, as engineers could begin module verification at the same time they were being designed. This reduced re-spins and lowered risk, leading to a more streamlined and efficient design and verification process.

Quantitative Benefit

The Incisive Formal Verifier accurately pinpointed design bugs in about an hour, significantly reducing the time typically taken to detect hard-to-find corner cases.
Functional bugs were detected months before testbench development and simulation could begin, speeding up the overall verification process.