As gate count of advanced chips gets bigger and bigger, design teams need more powerful emulation and prototyping systems to reduce time-to-market. Cadence, for its part, is responding to this need with the introduction of its Palladium Z2 Enterprise Emulation and Protium X2 Enterprise Prototyping systems, the latest generation of a coordinated solution that the company has dubbed “Dynamic Duo”. Let’s now take a closer look at these two new systems with the help of Paul Cunningham, Senior Vice President, System & Verification Group at Cadence, who recently gave a video interview on this topic to Sanjay Gangal from EDACafe.
EDACafe interviews Paul Cunningham, Senior Vice President, System & Verification Group at Cadence
Doubled capacity, 50% performance increase
The key to improved performance and capacity – compared to the previous generation of these systems, Palladium Z1 and Protium X1 – is the adoption of new processing engines. “They are powered by two different chips,” Cunningham explained. “Palladium Z2 is powered by a custom ASIC we actually built here at Cadence, (…) and Protium X2 is based on a massive capacity, leading edge Xilinx FPGA, the VU19P.” As Cunningham pointed out, Cadence has built two entirely new platforms around these chips, with new rack and new boards, achieving significant results: “Within the same rack footprint [as the previous generation], we are doubling the capacity per rack and we are increasing the performance by 50%. So there’s a very significant uplift in both these platforms.”
