Acacia uses Cadence Palladium emulation for optical designs

Cadence Design Systems reports that Acacia Communications has adopted its Palladium Z1 Enterprise Emulation Platform to accelerate the development of its DSP ASICs for optical networking applications.

Cadence says its emulation technology accelerates the development process by months over the traditional simulation-only approach for ASIC verification. With Cadence’s cloud-based usage model, Acacia was able to compile the full multi-hundred-million gate digital content for the platform locally, upload the image, and run tests of thousands of frames across many modes of operation in overnight regressions via the Palladium Cloud.

“In order to build a high-performance, low-power optical module, we needed a solution that could accommodate designs of up to 650M gates,” said Jon Stahl, director of ASIC at Acacia Communications. “The Cadence Palladium Z1 Enterprise Emulation Platform was the best choice, meeting our complex requirements for our DSP ASIC development. The Palladium Z1 platform proved to be easy to adopt, manage and scale, providing our engineering teams with the ability to deliver high-quality, innovative designs while adhering to tight deadlines. In particular, we found the cloud-based model, the debug features, and the top-notch support, to be compelling reasons to choose this solution.”

http://www.cadence.com/go/PalladiumZ1