Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Mentor Rolls SATA Verification Hardware

Wilsonville, Oregon-based Mentor Graphics, a developer of software for semiconductor design verification, announced Tuesday that the firm has shipped a new, hardware-assisted product focused on verification of products for the Serial-ATA (SATA) market. SATA is a protocol used to connect hard disk drives and related storage products to PCs and servers. Mentor said its new product is targeted at systems-on-a-chip designers, who need to test an accurate, hardware-based model of a real disk drive with their silicon. The firm said its iSolve SATA product ties into its Veloce hardware assisted emulators, which are used by hardware designers for their verification and simulation efforts. Pricing on the new product was not disclosed. The new product addresses the issues that designers have with simulating very complex devices like disk drives, and in particular accelerated the usually time-consuming simulation of the transfer of gigabytes worth of data required in SATA.