In the midst of the rapid evolution of the semiconductor industry, Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (Cadence) has once again demonstrated its leadership in high-performance hardware verification and debug with its latest Palladium Z3 Emulation and Protium X3 FPGA Prototyping systems. These two systems not only achieve a 1.5x acceleration in performance, but also a more than 2x increase in capacity, providing higher performance, capacity, and debug capabilities for complex SoCs and systems.
Boost performance and accelerate innovation
Cadence's Palladium Z3 system, with its new custom Cadence emulation processor, offers the industry's fastest compilation speeds and comprehensive pre-silicon hardware debugging capabilities. The improved performance means that customers can complete more design verification iterations in less time, with multiple design verification iterations per day, which was unimaginable with previous technologies. The Protium X3 System provides strong support for pre-silicon software verification of billion-gate designs with its rapid initial environment set-up.
A new level of digital twin technology
Digital twin technology creates virtual models that map physical entities to enable real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance, and optimized decision-making. Cadence's Palladium Z3 and Protium X3 systems are built on this philosophy by providing a seamlessly integrated process, a unified compiler, and a common virtual and physical interface to enable rapid migration of designs from a hardware simulation platform to a prototyping platform. This integration not only improves the efficiency of validation, but also provides customers with higher verification throughput, ensuring that hardware innovations can be brought to market faster.
Tackling complex designs and driving AI and high-performance computing
As SoC designs become increasingly complex, the Palladium Z3 and Protium X3 systems offer test scales from 16 million to 48 billion gates, allowing very large SoCs to be tested holistically, ensuring proper functionality and performance. Test capabilities at this scale are critical for Arm IP design innovation in AI, automotive, and data center applications. Cadence systems are driving design innovation in these areas, delivering significant benefits to mutual customers.
Collaborate and integrate to improve performance and scalability
Cadence's collaboration with NVIDIA has enabled the Palladium Z3 and Protium X3 systems to feature NVIDIA BlueField DPUs and NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand network connectors, which not only ensure consistent switching between systems, but also enable free conversion between virtual and physical interfaces. In addition, AMD has partnered with Cadence to integrate the AMD Versal™ Premium VP1902 Adaptive SoC into the Protium X3 system and AMD EPYC™ processor-based host servers into the Palladium Z3 and Protium X3 systems to increase capacity, performance, and scalability.
Figure：Cadence Palladium Z3 Emulation and Protium X3 FPGA Prototyping Platform
Conclusion
Cadence's Palladium Z3 and Protium X3 systems are not only performance monsters, but also revolutionaries in digital twin technology. They are bringing new life to the semiconductor industry by boosting performance, accelerating innovation, tackling complex designs, and advancing AI and high-performance computing. With the deployment and adoption of these systems, we have reason to believe that Cadence will continue to be a leader in intelligent system design.
