Emulation is an interesting market. It is served by two of the large EDA companies (Mentor and Cadence) and one smaller rival EVE. This is a hardware market rather than a pure software market that is so typical of the EDA world, and at the same time it is often the software that differentiates the products.

Yesterday, I saw an announcement by Mentor that Trident had adopted their Veloce emulation product, and it got me to thinking about similar announcements from their competitors. So I did a search and this is what I found:

Mentor has had four such announcements that I could find over the past year – HiSilicon, Mitsubishi, MIPS and today Trident.

Cadence has had three such announcements: Nethra, AMD and today - Silicon Hive

EVE has had two announcements: Fujitsu and Renesas.

Now we can’t tell a lot from these since the price of these boxes can be all over the map, and there is no indication of these being single or multiple machine purchases. I know that EVE now claims to be the number 1 emulator vendor and while this may be true in numbers, I do not know if it is true in terms of total $$s.

EVE also claims to be the fastest – which may be true, but certainly not the fastest in terms of compile times. EVE also has the largest capacity, but the other two vendors would claim that this is not an apples to apples comparison because their boxes have a lot more visibility and debug directly built into them, thus requiring far fewer iterations.

So, at the end of the day, I have to wonder if the emulation market will grow or shrink. If ESL does take off and a lot of system-verification moves into the front end of the development process – where systems are modeled in C, C++ or SystemC, this would argue that emulators will be on the decline. However, if we look at how long it took after the adoption of RTL methodologies before gate level verification stopped – this says these companies and products have quite a while before their usage would dwindle.

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Brian Bailey - keeping you covered

Update: Ran Avinun over at Cadence informed me of some of their wins that I had missed on my search. Here is his updated list:

You forgot the following announcements: Sharp, Netronome, ICT and the recent nVidia announcement about their Palladium usage at the Fermi project [...] - all these announced in 2009. If you look at the past year, you can add to this list also Comsys and ARM so depends on your definition, you should count Cadence emulation public announcements of 6-9 companies.

That would put Cadence in the lead. Care to respond Mentor or EVE?

Ran also commented on his views with regards to the increased usage of ESL:

I agree with your assessment that beyond emulation and overall HW-assisted verification, there will be more designs that will start in SystemC or in general in high-level of abstraction. These could be either synthesize to RTL and ported to emulation using high-level synthesis tools or will be ported to virtual platforms if the accuracy level is not critical.

Thanks for your thoughts Ran.