Wave Computing selects the Mentor Veloce Strato platform for verification and validation of artificial intelligence SoC designs

Mentor, a Siemens business, today announced that Wave Computing has selected the Veloce® Strato™ emulation platform for functional verification and validation of their latest Dataflow Processor Unit (DPU) chip designs, which will be used in the company’s next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) system. The Veloce Strato platform is a third-generation, data center-friendly emulation platform, and the only emulation solution available that enabled Wave Computing to tackle the verification of high-capacity AI designs from a hardware/software standpoint.

After an extensive evaluation of multiple emulation solutions, Wave Computing selected the Veloce Strato platform for its capacity and scaling advantages, breadth of virtual use models, outstanding reliability, and determinism, or repeatability, of verification results.

“Wave Computing is revolutionizing artificial intelligence and deep learning with our dataflow technology-based solutions, which are pushing the boundaries of AI system design. The Veloce Strato roadmap not only addresses growing capacity needs, but it also maps to the diverse and expanding challenges of hardware/software verification and validation,” said Darren Jones, vice president of Engineering, Wave Computing. “When we saw that our reliance on hardware emulation was growing beyond early software validation, we evaluated all available tools. The Veloce Strato platform was the best solution that met our needs. It enables a robust virtual emulation environment that tackles complex AI design challenges.”

The Wave Computing team conducted a detailed evaluation to select the appropriate emulator for their large AI designs. These DPU designs are highly scalable, and the evaluation demonstrated Veloce Strato to be superior in:

• Flexible capacity scalability, fast compilation, high throughput, fast design upload, full visibility and waveform exportability
• Suspend and resume job efficiency for debug and hardware utilization
• Comprehensive PCIe protocol analyzer functionality, and complete, efficient AI-related frameworks such as TensorFlow, Caffe and more.

“Artificial intelligence and machine learning design starts, as well as the investment in these technologies, are increasing at a rapid pace,” said Eric Selosse, vice president and general manager of the Mentor Emulation Division. “The flexibility and unique underlying architecture of the Veloce Strato emulation platform makes it a perfect fit for the verification and validation requirements of this soon-to-be pervasive AI technology.”

About the Veloce Strato emulation platform
The Veloce Strato emulation platform uses innovative software running on powerful, qualified hardware and an extensible operating system, to target design risks faster than hardware-centric strategies. Now considered among the most versatile and powerful of verification tools, emulation greatly expands the ability of project teams to conduct hardware debugging, hardware/software co-verification or integration, system-level prototyping, performance characterization, and low-power verification and power estimation. The Veloce Strato platform further reinforces Mentor’s role as an industry pioneer in all facets of hardware emulation, with an extensive portfolio of use models (Apps), excellent total throughput, rapid co-model bandwidth and time-to-visibility, and some of the highest effective capacity available.