EVE Donates Hardware Acceleration Tools to the University of California Santa Cruz

Sunday, January 25, 2009

EVE, the leader in hardware/software co-verification, has donated hardware acceleration technology and related software to the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC).

The donation of three Hammer 100 hardware accelerators and related software from EVE was made possible through the recently formed EVE University Connection Program to support universities in their verification-related education and research. The program enables students to gain valuable experience with best-in-class hardware-assisted verification solutions and better prepare them for real-world situations.

"The University of California Santa Cruz's Baskin School of Engineering is developing a reputation for its expertise in computer architecture and chip multiprocessor design," says Lauro Rizzatti, general manager of EVE-USA. "We are delighted to play a role in training the next-generation engineering experts in this field."

Hardware acceleration enables rapid virtual prototyping of designs to facilitate high-speed functional verification even before a design is manufactured. EVE’s Hammer was used to verify Sun's OpenSPARC™ T1 processor with CoolThreads™ technology. The open source version of this breakthrough processor design, along with its verification environment, is freely available through Sun’s OpenSPARC program at http://opensparc.net.

"This generous donation from EVE and Sun will have a long-lasting benefit for the electronics industry, as we properly train the next-generation verification engineer," affirms Professor Jose Renau of UCSC. "We're especially excited to be the first university to have access to this technology and expect that it will help us achieve our goals." Professor Renau and his students are designing a SPARC out-of-order processor and intend to use Hammer to accelerate the verification and validation of the system.

"Professor Renau and his students have proven to be creative and resourceful in their adoption of OpenSPARC as an academic research vehicle, and this donation will further complement their efforts," remarks Shrenik Mehta, senior director of Sun’s Frontend Technologies and OpenSPARC Program.