Platforms support multithreaded SPARC designs

Synopsys is providing Galaxy Design and Discovery Verification Platform support for Sun Microsystems' UltraSPARC T1 processor.

Synopsys is providing Galaxy Design and Discovery Verification Platform support for Sun Microsystems' UltraSPARC T1 processor, for which Sun recently announced the release of hardware design specifications under an open-source Gnu GPL licence.

This same extensive portfolio of electronic design automation (EDA) tools has been used by the Sun Microsystems engineering team to implement and verify the UltraSPARC T1 processor in silicon.

The availability of the UltraSPARC T1 processor design, coupled with Synopsys' extensive global user community and large university programme membership will help enable innovation in the area of chip multithreading (CMT) processor architecture design.

The UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads technology is an industry standard multithreaded processor with up to eight four-way multithreaded cores and a typical processor power consumption of 72W, delivering 32 simultaneous threads.

Sun recently announced that it is making the UltraSPARC T1 processor hardware design and verification suite available to the engineering community via an open source model.

The open source release will yield new hardware, software, tools and applications that can be readily produced.

"We're opening the doors of innovation for everyone to participate", said Shrenik Mehta, Director of Frontend Technologies and OpenSPARC Programme, Scalable Systems Group, Sun Microsystems.

"We use Synopsys' tools for synthesis, verification, testbench and physical implementation to help ensure our most advanced processors deliver the high performance our customers expect from us".

"Our OpenSPARC T1 release contains everything the engineering and academic world will need to get started with our UltraSPARC T1 design using Synopsys' synthesis and functional verification tools".

"This in turn, will help drive more design innovation within these important communities".

Sun's UltraSPARC T1 open source release includes synthesisable Verilog RTL source code, OpenVera test suites, monitors, and coverage objects as well as scripts supporting the use of Synopsys' Design Compiler synthesis and VCS RTL verification tools.

For the development and verification of the UltraSPARC T1, Sun Microsystems engineers used the Galaxy Design Platform solution for RTL synthesis, design planning, physical synthesis, place and route, and timing sign-off, and the Discovery Verification Platform for RTL verification, testbench automation, transistor-level analysis, and formal verification of custom logic and memories.

"Sun and Synopsys have been long-time collaborators in the engineering and academic communities, offering a breadth of solutions for complex design and verification challenges", said Rich Goldman, Vice President, Strategic Market Development at Synopsys.

"With the introduction of Sun's OpenSPARC initiative, design engineers, researchers and educators alike can benefit from the combination of Synopsys' advanced EDA tools and Sun's unique chip multithreading technology".

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